population growth and
Weather
Weather insurance
Witch killing
Women
discrimination against
health status of
politics and
Women’s World Banking
Work and Iron Status Evaluation (WISE)
World Absenteeism Survey
World Bank
dollar/day and
global crisis and
lower-caste children and
World Economic Forum
World Food Summit
World Health Organization (WHO)
aid spending by
immunization and
recommendations from
teen pregnancy and
WuDunn, Sheryl
Xin Meng
Xu Aihua
Young, Alwyn
Yunus, Muhammad
Zamindari system
Zinman, Jonathan
Zoellick, Robert
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the recipient of many awards, including most recently the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor to many organizations, including the World Bank and the Government of India.
Esther Duflo is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT. She was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris, and at MIT. Upon completing her PhD she was appointed assistant professor of economics at MIT, and has been there ever since. She is a fellow of the American Academy for Arts and Science and the Econometric Society. She has received numerous honors and prizes, including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40 in 2010, a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship in 2009, and the inaugural Calvo-Armengol International prize in 2010. She was recognized as one of the best eight young economists by The Economist magazine, one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy since the list has existed (2008, 2009 and 2010), and one of the “forty under forty” most influential business leaders by Fortune magazine in 2010.
In 2003, Banerjee and Duflo cofounded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which they have been directing together ever since. J-PAL is a network of affiliated professors in five offices around the world who are united by their use of randomized control trials to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation. J-PAL’s mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence. In 2009 J-PAL won the BBVA “Frontier of Knowledge” Award in the development cooperation category.
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Copyright © 2011 by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Banerjee, Abhijit V.
Poor economics : a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty / Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo.
p. cm.
Includes index.
Summary: “Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world’s poor. But much of the work they do is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, flat out harmful misperceptions at worst. Banerjee and Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Their work transforms certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low. Throughout, the authors emphasize that life for the poor is simply not like life for everyone else: it is a much more perilous adventure, denied many of the cushions and advantages that are routinely provided to the more affluent”—Provided by publisher.
eISBN : 978-1-610-39040-8
1. Economic assistance—Developing countries. 2. Poverty—Prevention. I. Duflo, Esther, 1972- II. Title.
HC59.7.B323 2011
339.4’6091724—dc22
2010050938
Poor Economics Page 36