This book reviews quantitative methods and models of impact evaluation. The formal literature on impact evaluation methods and practices is large, with a few useful overviews. Yet there is a need to put the theory into practice in a hands-on fashion for practitioners. This book also details...

Over the past 20 years, Bangladesh has witnessed strong competition among microfinance institutions. Using program-level panel data from 2005-2010, this paper studies the microfinance institutions'recent competitive roles in their pricing of products, targeting strategies and portfolio shifts,...

The crash of global financial markets in 2008 caused a ripple effect on economic demand and growth worldwide. Export-oriented economies were hit particularly hard, and many governments stepped in quickly with broad-ranging stimulus programs to lessen the effects on households of rising...

The rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to use labor and capital more efficiently. But significant knowledge gaps remain as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into household...

A rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to employ labor and capital more efficiently. Significant knowledge gaps persist, however, as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into...

Both formal, and informal loans matter in agriculture. But formal lenders provide much more in production lending, than do informal lenders, often at a higher cost than what they can recover. The Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan (ADBP), for example, providing about 90 percent of formal...

This paper examines the role of social safety-net programs in Bangladesh run by the government and nongovernmental organizations to mitigate seasonal deprivation in the country's highly vulnerable northwest region. Specifically, the paper explores whether social safety nets are limited to...

Energy poverty is a frequently used term among energy specialists, but unfortunately the concept is rather loosely defined. Several existing approaches measure energy poverty by defining an energy poverty line as the minimum quantity of physical energy neededto perform such basic tasks as...

The Thailand Village Fund is the second-largest microcredit scheme in the world. Nearly 80,000 elected local Village Fund committees administer loans that reach 30 percent of all households. The value of Village Fund loans has remained steady since 2006, even without new infusions of government...