Bangladesh is one of the world's
poorest countries. Nearly 80 percent of the nation's
140 million people reside in rural areas; of these, 20
percent live in extreme poverty. Geographically, many
low-lying areas are vulnerable to severe flooding, while
other regions are prone to drought, erosion, and soil
salinity. Such an unfavorable agricultural landscape,
combined with mismanagement of natural resources and

This paper assesses the role of ideas in
economic change, combining economic and historical analysis
with insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology.
Belief systems shape the system of categories
("pre-confirmatory bias") and perceptions
(confirmatory bias), and are themselves constrained by
fundamental values. The authors illustrate the model using
the historical construction of racial categories. Given the

This paper explains how climate change
may increase future migration, and which risks are
associated with such migration. It also examines how some of
this migration may enhance the capacity of communities to
adapt to climate change. Climate change is likely to result
in some increase above baseline rates of migration in the
next 40 years. Most of this migration will occur within
developing countries. There is little reason to think that

Employing a view of culture as a
communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement,
which is deeply influenced by social and economic
inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break
free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is
political and economic. In this paper, they analyze
important examples of discursive spaces - public meetings in
Indian village democracies (gram sabhas), where villagers

This study analyzes the complicated and
dynamic nature of welfare differences across space. The
objectives are two-fold. First, the study seeks to provide a
methodological framework useful for investigating the
determinants of the observed differences in the standards of
living between two regions at a given point in time. Second,
it aims to provide empirical evidence on regional welfare
differences to inform the policy debate surrounding regional

This assessment of poverty and
inequality comes at an important juncture for Kenya. The
December 2007 elections and subsequent pronouncements of the
newly formed Grand Coalition have underlined the salience of
these issues to ordinary Kenyans, and for policy makers. The
violence in early 2008 highlighted the importance of
addressing poverty and inequality as major goals in their
own right, but also for instrumental reasons, as major goals

The relationship between wealth and
child labor has been widely examined. This paper uses three
rounds of time-series, cross-sectional data to examine the
relationship between wealth and child labor and schooling.
The paper finds that wealth is crucial in determining a
child's activities, but that this factor is far from
being a sufficient condition to enroll a child in school.
This is particularly the case for rural girls. Nonparametric

Although there has been considerable
recent interest in micro-credit programs, rigorous evidence
on the impacts of forming self-help groups to mobilize
savings and foster social empowerment at the local level is
virtually non-existent, despite a large number of programs
following this pattern. The authors use a large household
survey to assess the economic and social impacts of the
formation of self-help groups in India. They find positive

With favorable geographical location,
macroeconomic stability, debt reduction, progress on
structural reforms, and political stability, Benin will seem
to have the foundations for a dynamic, diversified economy.
Yet the country's economic structure has not evolved,
remaining highly dependent on cotton and transit trade, and
per-capita growth has slowed down in recent years. The
government has requested the World Bank's assistance in

Despite the popularity and unique nature
of women's self-help groups in India, evidence of their
economic impacts is scant. Based on two rounds of a 2,400
household panel, the authors use double differences,
propensity score matching, and pipeline comparison to assess
economic impacts of longer (2.5-3 years) exposure of a
program that promoted and strengthened self-help programs in
Andhra Pradesh in India. The analysis finds that longer

Well-functioning groups enforce social
norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of
a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. This
paper studies how the exogenous assignment to different
positions in an extreme social hierarchy - the caste system
- affects individuals' willingness to punish violations
of a cooperation norm. Although the analysis controls for
individual wealth, education, and political participation,

Although much has been written about
climate change and poverty as distinct and complex problems,
the link between them has received little attention.
Understanding this link is vital for the formulation of
effective policy responses to climate change. This paper
focuses on agriculture as a primary means by which the
impacts of climate change are transmitted to the poor, and
as a sector at the forefront of climate change mitigation