Understanding poverty and what to do about it, is perhaps the central
concern of all of economics. Yet the lay public almost never gets to
hear what leading professional economists have to say about it. This
volume brings together twenty-eight essays by some of the world
leaders in the field, who were invited to tell the lay reader about
the most important things they have learnt from their research that
relate to poverty. The essays cover a wide array of topics: the first
essay is about how poverty gets measured. The next section is about
the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from
the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of
"excessive" population growth, corruption and ethnic conflict. The
next section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays
discuss how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the
diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from
micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, how to design
welfare policies that work better and a host of other topics. The
final section is about where the puzzles lie: what are the most
important anomalies, the big gaps in the way economists think about
poverty? The essays talk about the puzzling reluctance of Kenyan
farmers to fertilizers, the enduring power of social relationships in
economic transactions in developing countries and the need to
understand where aspirations come from, and much else. Every essay is
written with the aim of presenting the latest and the most
sophisticated in economics without any recourse to jargon or technical
language.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780199885459
Publisert
2020
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok