This paper looks at the establishment and evolution of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. It traces the development of the Bank from its origins, providing microcredit to poor, rural women in Bangladesh, through a period of national expansion and institutionalisation, to the replication around the...

In recent years, a debate about the potential of decentralisation for poverty alleviation has set off among academics and policy-makers. It is often claimed that decentralisation can be effective for improvements in welfare and hence the reduction of poverty. For example, the World Bank explains...

This paper argues that the study of the demand for financial services in developing countries leaves out part of the story if it looks at only one of the three elements of the so-called finance trinity—that is, savings products, loans and insurance—as is largely done in the literature. In...

The paper explores the extent to which people adapt to their deprived living conditions and what kind of form adaptation processes take. The study combines quantitative and qualitative information drawing back on survey data and case studies from two villages in Andhra Pradesh, India. One of the...

This paper concerns the institutional origins of economic development, emphasising the cases of 19th-century India and Africa. Colonial institutions – the law, western style property rights, newspapers and statistical analysis – played an important part in the emergence of Indian public and...

This paper examines the paradox that a borrower's status aspirations may contribute to a situation in which their borrowings exceed their capacity to repay. This paradox was first described by Thorstein Veblen, and has been fleshed out by Pierre Bourdieu. Thus in the theory of consumer culture...

This paper focuses on the nexus between state infrastructural power and legitimacy. A comparative case study of nationalism in mid-20th century Mexico and Argentina provides the basis for theorising the impact of state infrastructural power on transformations of official national ideology. Both...

This paper reports the main findings from a multi-country research project designed to develop a better understanding of the performance of community-managed rural water supply systems in developing countries. Data was collected from households, village water committees, focus groups of village...

Using new data on 590 Turkish households in Berlin, we investigate the determinants and impact of integration on economic performance. We find that the usual suspects, such as time spent in Germany and education, have positive impact, while networks have no impact on integration. There is strong...

This paper provides a chronological account of the evolution of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It examines their historical antecedents; the UN conferences and summits that provided their content; the role of OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in formulating the...