The policy brief describes the life stories of five people, to show the face of human face of chronic poverty. It also suggests that such life history material can be an important source of data for policies.

A method of collecting family histories that would act as a means of linking households from the panel studies with individual life histories is proposed. The procedure used to construct a three-generation ‘social genealogical’ chart of the family and a strategy for interviewing...

Recognising the dearth of detailed analyses of economic and environmental performance of traditional water harvesting systems (TWHS) meant exclusively for domestic use, this paper enquires into the relevance and explores possible modernisation/revival of talavas (tanks) in two villages of...

This study aimed to provide some insights into sanitation-related strategies taken by the BRAC Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Programme from an economic point of view. The aim of this report included measuring and identifying the factors that influence willingness to pay for improved...

In the context of the current public policy focus on rising food prices and their implications for food security, this paper examines two major issues raised: (i) Universalization of the public distribution system; and (ii) its implications for procurement and buffer-stocks. This paper is based...

Panel studies based on the same set of sample households or individuals at two points of time 5 or 10 years apart are time consuming and are relatively rare in social science research. Such a method, however, was used in the South Asia Migration study (SMS) conducted by the Centre for...

The purpose of this study is to review the changes that have taken place recently in water supply and sanitation services and examine the role of various stakeholders involved in urban governance in this sector. [CSH Occassonal Paper N 22/2008].

It is argued that for households below poverty line any expenditure on health is catastrophic as they are unable to attain the subsistence level of consumption. Thus, zero percent is taken as a threshold level to define catastrophic health expenditure and examine the impact of health insurance...

Despite the general consensus that microfinance does not reach the poorest; recent evidence suggests that nearly 15% of microfinance clients in Bangladesh are among the poorest. It is from the realization that even within the existing microfinance membership of BRAC, there is a significant...

This paper examines steady states of an overlapping generations economy with a given distribution of household locations over a one-dimensional interval. Parents decide whether or not to educate their children. The model therefore combines local social interaction with global market interaction....