Are ostensibly demand-driven public works programs with high levels of safeguards nonetheless susceptible to politi al influence?We investigate this conjecture using expenditure data at the local level from India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Focusing on one state where...

This chapter examines the extension of microfinance services to people in Kenya. Using data collected from seventeen Financial Service Associations (FSAs) founded by the Kenya Rural Enterprise Program (K-REP) Development Agency (KDA), we explore the intricacies of microfinance institutions...

We develop a simple theoretical model of market participation over multiple seasons in the presence of liquidity constraints and transactions costs to explain the 'sell low, buy high' puzzle wherein certain households forego opportunities for intertemporal price arbitrage through storage and are...

The current global agreement governing food aid - the Food Aid Convention (FAC) - has been subject to annual renewals since it expired in 2002. Critics have pointed to some serious limitations, but negotiations over a new FAC have become entangled in U.S.-European agricultural trade disputes....

A growing literature on poverty traps emphasizes the links between multiple equilibria and risk avoidance. However, multiple equilibria may also foster risk taking behavior by some poor people. We illustrate this idea with a simple analytical model in which people with different wealth and...

The literature on economic growth and development has focused considerable attention on questions of risk management and the possibility of multiple equilibria associated with poverty traps. We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth...

This paper explores whether there exist differences in groupwise poverty in Madagascar; that is, whether there is a pattern over time of consistently poorer performance among sub-populations readily identifiable by one or more identity markers. Three key messages come out of this analysis....

In this paper we examine the relative importance of rural versus urban areas in terms of monetary poverty and seven other related living standards indicators. We present the levels of urban--rural differences for several African countries for which we have data and find that living standards in...