This paper focuses on the role of "institutions" in the fight against poverty and inequality. Our view of institutions encompasses formal rules designed by polity (including those in the legal and economics sphere such as rules of property rights, contracts and liabilities) as well as informal...

This paper focuses on the role of "institutions" in poverty alleviation, where both poverty and institutions are interpreted broadly. The broadening of the poverty notion is important at least from the policy perspective. Even if one were convinced that higher growth would reduce income poverty...

Bangladesh needs to start afresh with innovative means of financing the provision of health care since in its absence the poor end up relying largely on self-insurance devices to mitigate health risks, which entails high implicit premiums. Existing insurance type programmes essentially consist...

While both microcredit and microinsurance products in the developing world have essentially emerged in a regulatory vacuum, the general consensus appears to be that self-regulation may have thus far served the global microcredit industry adequately. The same premise is likely to be false when it...

This paper examines disease-specific impoverishment impact of out-of-pocket (OOP) payments using a dataset of 3,941 households obtained from a survey conducted in 120 villages of seven districts in Bangladesh. We have estimated the poverty impact of OOP payments by comparing the difference...

In this article, the authors show that a wage tax, which neither alters the relative price of current versus future consumption nor distorts the relative expected return (vis-à-vis the cost) to investing in human capital, leads to biases at both these margins. The authors find that the common...

While both microcredit and microinsurance products in the developing world have essentially emerged in a regulatory vacuum, the general consensus appears to be that self-regulation may have thus far served the global microcredit industry adequately. The same premise is likely to be false when it...