Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty And The Ways To End It - Hardcover

Abhijit V. Banerjee; Esther Duflo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8184001819 ISBN 13: 9788184001815

Publisher: Random House, India, 2011

Synopsis

Imagine you have a few million dollars. You want to spend it on the poor. How do you go about it? Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world s poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions about the poor and the world that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics through their award-winning Poverty Action Lab. They argue that by using randomized control trials, and more generally, by paying careful attention to the evidence, it is possible to make accurate and often startling assessments on what really impacts the poor and what doesn t. Why would a man in Morocco who doesn t have enough to eat buy a television? Why is it so hard for children in poor areas to learn even when they attend school? Why do the poorest people in Maharashtra spend 5 percent of their total budget on sugar? Does having lots of children actually make you poorer? Drawing on their research at the Poverty Action Lab and their fifteen years of fieldwork in India and across the world, the two economists ask many such questions and show why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives. Revelatory and impassioned, Poor Economics is a pathbreaking book that will help you to understand the real causes of poverty and how to end it.

About this title

Book Description:

Financial Times’ Best Business Book of the Year

About the Author:

Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. He has also received the inaugural Infosys Prize (2009) in Social Sciences and Economics.
Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. Duflo has received numerous academic honours and prizes including most recently the John Bates Clark Medal (2010) and a MacArthur Fellowship (2009). She has also been featured in Foreign Policys Top 100 Global Thinkers and Fortunes 40 under 40.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House, India
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 8184001819
• ISBN 13: 9788184001815
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320