Cash transfers and index insurance have become popular interventions by development agencies worldwide, yet surprisingly little is known about these programs' comparative impacts on participant behavior or well-being. This paper exploits exogenous variation in program participation and panel...

This special issue originates with a three week Seminar in Christian Scholarship that Calvin College graciously hosted in July 2005 on the topic, "Making Markets Work for the Rural Poor: Christian Mission and Global Enterprise". This seminar involved 14 participants from 10 different colleges...

This paper demonstrates that there are potentially large returns to social protection policy that stakes out a productive safety net below the vulnerable and keeps them from slipping into a poverty trap. Much of the value of the productive safety net comes from mitigating the ex ante effects of...

Millennium Development Goal #1 is to halve extreme poverty ($1/day per person) and hunger. Progress toward this goal has been excellent at global level, led by China and India, but woefully insufficient in sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa, a disproportionate share of the extreme poor are...

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...

Food-for-work (FFW) programs are commonly used both for short-term relief and long-term development purposes. In the latter capacity, they are increasingly used for natural resources management projects. Barrett, Holden and Clay (forthcoming) assess the suitability of FFW programs as insurance...

A sound understanding of poverty traps — defined as poverty that is self-reinforcing due to the poor's equilibrium behaviors — and their underlying mechanisms is fundamentally important to the development of policies and interventions targeted to assist the poor. We review the theoretical...

Longitudinal data on household living standards open the way to a deeper analysis of the nature and extent of poverty. While a number of studies have exploited this type of data to distinguish transitory from more chronic forms of income or expenditure poverty, this paper develops an asset-based...

his paper introduces a special issue exploring persistent poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. As a set, these papers break new ground in exploring the dynamics of structural poverty, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis and adopting an asset-based approach to the study of...