Understanding poverty

This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The first section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of "excessive" population growth, corruption, and ethnic conflict. The second section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss issues such as how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, and how to design welfare policies that work better. The third section presents new ways of thinking about poverty such as the integration of psychology and economics, nonmarket institutions, and interconnections between race and economic inequality.