The purpose of this paper is to identify public policy and program interventions that can increase real rural wage rates and hence reduce rural poverty. Rural wages can only increase if the demand for rural labor grows faster than its supply. The report states that whether public policies...

This paper addresses whether microcredit participants in Bangladesh are trapped in poverty and debt, as many critics have argued in recent years. Analysis of data from a long panel survey over a 20-year period confirms this is not the case, although numerous participants have been with...

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...

Competing theories increasingly support the positive role of social capital in small loan default costs of group lending; at the same time, potential group collusion may increase loan delinquencies. Findings from the available literature are mixed on the role of the various attributes of group...

Microcredit programs in Bangladesh have experienced spectacular growth in recent years, with a growing number of borrowers availing credit from multiple microcredit agencies. There is a growing concern that if there are not sufficient returns to borrowing from microfinance institutions (MFIS),...

This paper uses long panel survey data spanning over 20 years to examine the dynamics of microcredit programs in Bangladesh. With the phenomenal growth of microfinance institutions representing 30 million members with over $2 billion of annual disbursement over the past two decades, it is...

"The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,"by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2011) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998) article"The Impact of Group-Based Credit on Poor...

This paper proposes an estimator for the endogenous switching regression models with fixed effects. The estimator allows for endogenous selection and for conditional heteroscedasticity in the outcome equation. Applying the estimator to a dataset on the productivity in agriculture substantially...

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 needed to perform such basic tasks as...

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...