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In this study, the impact of access to electricity on poverty reduction for Botswana is examined using the annual data from 1990 to 2021. The study was motivated by the need to establish if access to electricity could be a panacea on poverty reduction in Botswana. Given that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals deadline is fast approaching, and Botswana being one of the signatories, is expected to end poverty in all its forms – Goal 1. Establishing the role that electrification plays in poverty alleviation, helps in refocusing Botswana’s poverty alleviation strategies on factors that have high impact on poverty. The main objective of this study, therefore, is to investigate the relationship between poverty alleviation and access to electricity in Botswana.

The study uses the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to investigate the nature of the relations. Two poverty proxies were used in this study namely, household consumption expenditure and life expectancy.

The study found access to electricity to reduce poverty in the long run and in the short run, regardless of the poverty measure used. Thus, access to electricity plays an important role in poverty alleviation and Botswana is recommended to continue with the rural and urban electrification initiatives.

The study explores the impact of access to electricity on poverty reduction in Botswana, a departure from the current studies that examined the same relationship using energy consumption in general. This is on the back of increasing dependence of economic activities on electricity as a major source of energy.

The aim of this paper is to examine poverty and poverty reduction at the local level using the Hohoe Municipality and Sefwi‐Wiaso District, both in Ghana, as a case.

The paper adopts a survey method, collecting data from 180 farmers on the various aspects of the topic to form the basis of the study. Questionnaires and focus group discussions were used as the data collection instruments.

The study found that, although many poverty reduction initiatives have been undertaken in Ghana, their impact on the poor farming communities has been very minimal. The failure of these poverty reduction policies could be attributed to the non‐involvement of local people in the process of policy formation. It also revealed that the number of poor people and the degree of poverty might be higher than the details captured by official statistics and publications.

The paper is biased towards farmers. It did not consider other sectors of the Ghanaian population.

Poverty reduction programmes to be developed and implemented in the future must be designed using bottom‐up approaches and must factor the rural farmer into the equation since the agriculture sector is still the largest employer in Ghana.

The paper discusses poverty and how it can be reduced, relying on what the victims of poverty consider as the main causes of poverty and how its reduction can be achieved.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between mobile phones, the internet, financial inclusion, the informal economy and poverty reduction.

The study examines the relationship between mobile phones, the internet, financial inclusion, the informal economy and poverty reduction using the system generalized method of moments approach and a panel data set of 42 African countries for the period 1995–2017.

The study shows that mobile penetration and internet usage have significant positive relationship with the informal sector. Financial inclusion has significant effects, meaning that increased financial inclusion is associated with a developed informal economy. Also, mobile penetration and internet usage play significant roles in the relationship between financial inclusion and the informal economy. Further, mobile penetration and internet usage have a significant positive relationship with poverty reduction. Similarly, financial inclusion has significant effects, meaning higher financial inclusion is associated with increased poverty reduction. The informal economy also has significant effects, suggesting that the development of the informal economy is associated with poverty reduction.

Most importantly, mobile penetration, internet usage and financial inclusion play significant roles in the link between the informal economy and poverty reduction.

The paper seeks to examine the inter‐temporal causal relationship between financial development and poverty reduction in Kenya during the period 1968‐2006. The study attempts to answer one critical question: is financial development in Kenya a spur to poverty reduction?

The study uses a trivariate causality model based on cointegration and error‐correction mechanism. Unlike the majority of the previous studies, the current study incorporates the savings rate as an intermittent variable in the bivariate causality setting between financial development and poverty reduction – thereby creating a simple trivariate causality model.

The study finds a distinct causal flow from financial development to poverty reduction in Kenya. In addition, the study finds a uni‐directional causality from financial development to savings and a bi‐directional causality between savings and poverty reduction. The results apply irrespective of whether the causality test is conducted in the short run or in the long run.

The empirical results of this study will help policy makers to determine whether the financial development in Kenya is pro‐poor and pro‐savings.

Although several attempts have been made to investigate the relationship between financial development, savings, economic growth and other macroeconomic variables, very few studies have examined the impact of financial development on the ultimate policy goal, i.e. poverty reduction. Moreover, the majority of the previous studies are based mainly on Asia and Latin America – affording sub‐Saharan African countries very little or no coverage at all.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial sector development and poverty reduction in India using annual data from 1970 to 2012. The paper attempts to answer the critical question: does financial sector development lead to poverty reduction?

Stationarity properties of the series are checked by using Ng-Perron unit root test. The paper uses the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound testing approach to co-integration to examine the existence of long-run relationship; error-correction mechanism for the short-run dynamics and Granger non-causality test to test the direction of causality.

The co-integration test confirms a long-run relationship between financial development and poverty reduction for India. The ARDL test results suggest that financial development and economic growth reduces poverty in both long run and short run. The causality test confirms that there is a positive and unidirectional causality running from financial development to poverty reduction.

This study implies that poverty in India can be reduced by financial inclusion and financial accessibility to the poor. For a fast growing economy with respect to financial sector development this may have far-reaching implication toward inclusive growth.

This paper is the first of its kind to empirically examine the causal relationship between financial sector development and poverty reduction in India using modern econometric techniques.

India is a developing nation where the marginal benefit of infrastructure development is tremendous. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between infrastructure development and poverty reduction for India using the yearly data from 1991 to 2015.

The authors use the principal component analysis to construct indices for four major sub-sectors, namely, transport, water and sanitation, telecommunications and energy, falling under the broad infrastructure sector and then using these sectorwise indices, the authors construct an overall index which represents infrastructure development. The authors provide evidence on the link between infrastructure development and poverty reduction by using the auto regressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound testing approach.

The ARDL test results suggest that infrastructure development and economic growth reduce poverty in both long run and short run. The causality test confirms that there is a positive and unidirectional causality running from infrastructure development to poverty reduction.

The study confirms that India’s Infrastructure development plays a vital role in reducing poverty and calls for the Indian Government to adopt economic policies which are aimed at developing and strengthening the infrastructure levels and bringing in more investment in the infrastructure sector in order to help the poor population by making them exposed to better opportunities of employment and income growth, thereby achieving the goal of poverty reduction.

This paper is a fresh and unique attempt of its kind to empirically investigate the causal relationship between infrastructure development and poverty reduction in India using modern econometric techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors which are instrumental to poverty reduction opposed to many factors that are considered as impediments to poverty reduction in a poor country like Bangladesh.

This paper is an outcome of review of literature covered wide range of issues including sectoral contribution to economic growth but none has exclusively dealt with the instrumental role of the poverty reduction factors, insider’s view, long-term observations (1960-2014), and reviews of secondary data.

In order to reduce poverty, rather than attempting to change the “culture of poverty,” remove the “structural trap,” or “kin system as poverty trap” it can be achieved through harnessing the enabling factors of poverty reduction. Study argues that rather than focusing on “barriers” to poverty reduction, a country needs to identify and focus on its “potential” factors of poverty reduction. The dominant enabling factors for Bangladesh were agricultural development and remittance. The utilization of land and labor could bring a transformation in the rural economy of Bangladesh which was essential to poverty reduction.

The study shows that the individuals can escape poverty largely through their own effort where a proper policy support from the government is needed. The state needs to play the facilitating role rather than the instrumental in the case of poverty reduction.

The paper reveals instruments to poverty reduction where usual practice was to identify the barrier to development and to suggest the means of overcoming those barriers. It suggests how to look into the matter from other way round where instead of identifying the barrier attempt should be made to identify the enabling factors and to harness those enabling factors. The findings are based on the country-specific literatures but not generalized in the form as attempted here. The study shows a means of poverty reduction where country-specific strategy or home-grown model can be drawn out based on the identification of potential factors.

This study examines the roles of cross-sectional dependence, asymmetric structure and country-to-country policy variations in the inflation-poverty reduction causal nexus in selected sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 1981 to 2019.

To account for cross-sectional dependence, heterogeneity and policy variations across countries in the inflation-poverty reduction causal nexus, this study uses robust Hatemi-J data decomposition procedures and a battery of second-generation techniques. These techniques include cross-sectional dependency tests, panel unit root tests, slope homogeneity tests and the Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel Granger non-causality approach.

Unlike existing studies, the panel and country-specific findings exhibit several dimensions of asymmetric causality in the inflation-poverty nexus. Positive inflationary shocks Granger-causes poverty reduction through investment and employment opportunities that benefit the impoverished in SSA. These findings align with country-specific analyses of Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mauritania, South Africa and Togo. Also, a decline in poverty causes inflation to increase in the Congo Republic, Madagascar, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo. All panel and country-specific analyses reveal at least one dimension of asymmetric causality or another.

All stakeholders and policymakers must pay adequate attention to issues of asymmetric structures, nonlinearities and country-to-country policy variations to address country-specific issues and the socioeconomic problems in the probable causal nexus between the high incidence of extreme poverty and double-digit inflation rates in most SSA countries.

Studies on the inflation-poverty nexus are not uncommon in economic literature. Most existing studies focus on inflation’s effect on poverty. Existing studies that examine the inflation-poverty causal relationship covertly assume no asymmetric structure and nonlinearity. Also, the issues of cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity are unexplored in the causal link in existing studies. All panel studies covertly impose homogeneous policies on countries in the causality. This study relaxes this supposition by allowing policies to vary across countries in the panel framework. Thus, this study makes three-dimensional contributions to increasing understanding of the inflation-poverty nexus.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between industrial sector growth, inequalities and urban poverty reduction

The paper used static panel data analysis. However, the tests suggest that there are no state-specific effects; hence, the pooled panel regression techniques are used for the analysis.

The findings of the paper suggest that the industrial sector growth exert no significance on urban poverty while the urban wholesale and retail services growth is found to be substantially strong in reducing urban poverty. The results also indicate that there is no statistically significant evidence to conclude that higher incidence of urban poverty was due to the high degree of inequalities.

This paper has provided some helpful results in understanding the heterogeneous effects of sectoral components of growth of urban poverty in the presence of high income inequalities, but the limitation of this study is that there is no disaggregated poverty and growth data on different occupational activity.

There is a need to expand investment in the production and export manufacturing labor-intensive sectors; this will help increase the labor absorption rate of the industry and, thus, reduce poverty in the urban areas.

The paper improves on previous research on poverty in Nigeria by explicitly recognizing the effects of location and inequality.

This study examines the relative efficiencies of anti-poverty policies implemented in 28 Chinese provinces.

This study uses meta-frontier undesirable dynamic two-stage data envelopment analysis. The authors divide the poverty reduction process into two stages: agricultural production and poverty reduction. Public expenditure is the input for the second stage, and the population below the poverty line is the undesirable output. The authors compute the efficiencies (overall efficiency, efficiency of each stage and the efficiencies of individual inputs and outputs) using meta-frontier analysis for the 28 provinces.

The results show that: (1) a significant imbalance exists between the eastern and western regions in terms of input-output efficiencies; (2) the poverty reduction stage generally fared better than the agricultural production stage did. In particular, most provinces saw increases in poverty reduction efficiencies between 2013 and 2017; (3) the place-based poverty relief policies introduced in recent years are effective at reducing the poverty rate and reaching the government-set goals and (4) while disposable income has increased steadily over the past few years, income inequality has been exacerbated.

The results show that: (1) a significant imbalance exists between the eastern and western regions in terms of input-output efficiencies; (2) the poverty reduction stage generally fared better than the agricultural production stage did. In particular, most provinces saw increases in poverty reduction efficiencies between 2013 and 2017; (3) the place-based poverty relief policies introduced in recent years are effective at reducing the poverty rate and reaching the government-set goals and (4) while disposable income has increased steadily over the past few years, income inequality has exacerbated.

A large amount of attention and public resources are devoted to fighting poverty and associated market failures in China. The extant literature focuses either on the agricultural production itself or the relationship between human capital and productivity levels. Making use of recent developments of the DEA method, the authors propose a new framework for evaluating the efficiencies of the poverty reduction process. Such a framework has the advantage of giving researchers and policymakers a more detailed diagnosis with regard to the components in the endeavor to eliminate poverty and providing useful information for policymakers to optimize public funds use. Methodologically, the framework is flexible enough to be employed for future research in similar appraisals, at different geographic and scale aggregation levels, for public projects including but not limited to poverty reduction.