The geographic location of banks' branches is used to test whether they are responding to unexploited gains from nonfarm rural development in Bangladesh. The branch locations of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank are compared with those of traditional banks. The potential gains from switching out of...

While the incidence of extreme poverty in China fell dramatically over 1980-2001, progress was uneven over time and across provinces. Rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor, though migration to urban areas helped. The pattern of growth mattered. Rural economic growth was far...

This paper shows how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure economic-growth component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to "non-income" factors and differences...