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

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PublicAffairs, Mar 27, 2012 - Business & Economics - 320 pages
Two practical visionaries upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live.

Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two award-winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Called "marvelous, rewarding" by the Wall Street Journal, the book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of life on 99 cents a day. Poor Economics shows that creating a world without poverty begins with understanding the daily decisions facing the poor.

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About the author (2012)

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, including most recently the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor to many organizations including the World Bank and the Government of India. Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. She is a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award (2009) and the John Bates Clark medal awarded annually to the best American economist under forty (2012). In 2003, Banerjee and Duflo cofounded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which they continue to direct.

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