This paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents' escape from poverty traps. We model and simulate endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology...

Progressively targeted cash transfers remain the dominant policy response to chronic poverty in developing countries. But are there alternative social protection policies that might have larger poverty impacts over time for the same public expenditure? To explore this question, this paper...

From 2000 to 2014, per capita gross domestic product in Sub-Saharan Africa increased by almost 35 percent in real terms, doubling in some countries. Such progress happened while agricultural productivity growth remained low in the aggregate, despite some bright spots, and poverty reduction was...

This paper uses a unique, spatially-explicit dataset to study the link between agricultural performance and rural poverty in Madagascar. We show that, controlling for geographical and physical characteristics, communes that have higher rates of adoption of improved agricultural technologies and,...

Food security is a growing concern worldwide. More than 1 billion people are estimated to lack sufficient dietary energy availability, and at least twice that number suffer micronutrient deficiencies. Because indicators inform action, much current research focuses on improving food insecurity...

This paper introduces a special feature on biodiversity conservation and poverty traps. We define and explain the core concepts and then identify four distinct classes of mechanisms that define important interlinkages between biodiversity and poverty. The multiplicity of candidate mechanisms...

The moral and economic imperatives to intervene in poverty traps motivate the identification of poverty traps and their structural causes so as to inform the design of appropriate policy responses. However, empirical identification remains challenging because of poverty traps' complexity. After...

This study explores the potential of index insurance as a mechanism to finance community-based biodiversity conservation in areas where a strong correlation exists between natural disaster risk, keystone species populations, and the well-being of the local population. We illustrate this...