Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

Winner of the 2011 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award

Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world's poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.

This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.

• Good Economics for Hard Times : Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
• The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
• The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
• Good Economics for Hard Times
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
• Capital in the Twenty First Century
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
• Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do about It