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...

India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is the largest public works employment project in the world. Its most direct poverty reduction pathway is through boosting employment and income for the poor. How effectively this direct transfer mechanism reduces...

Meeting the 1996 World Food Summit goal of halving chronic hunger in the world by 2015 will require more than 75,000 persons each day exiting the ranks of the food insecure. Is this feasible? Yes. Is the task simple? No. Widespread vulnerability is the complex product of asset poverty,...

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...

Understanding and alleviating poverty in Africa continues to receive considerable attention by a range of diverse actors, including politicians, international celebrities, academics, activists, and practitioners. Despite the onslaught of interest, there surprisingly is little agreement on what...

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...

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...