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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.

The paper aims to prove that between 1992 and 2016, people in poverty as a proportion of the total population has not been reduced. In particular, food poverty (FP) represented an average of 22%, despite the fact that gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and GDP, social development expenditure and food programme expenditure (both as GDP proportion) grew by 0.96%, 1.9%, 2.7% and −17.4% on an annual average, respectively.

There are non-linear relationships between economic growth and food poverty expenditure to reduce poverty. Three econometric models were estimated as follows: a linear model [ordinary least squares (OLS)] that addresses the capability of the economic growth to reduce FP (which detects a structural change in 2007) and three models of regime change (Markov–Switching Regression) that prove the existence of two different regimes.

The author proved that economic growth has lost the capability to reduce poverty and that there are decreasing effects of expenditure in addressing poverty since 2007. These results point out that Mexico is in a poverty trap and suggests that for the economy as for life and even more in the case of social (public) policies, more is not necessarily better than less. Therefore, the author suggests that the resources allocated in response to poverty may well have generated perverse incentives that yielded the opposite results.

There is no official measure of the public expenditure for poverty. Therefore, an accurate series was built to estimate the government effort and do the econometrics that proves the main hypothesis. This is another contribution.

It is imperative that microcredit organisations (MCOs) have a high level of awareness of the environmental context in which their clients pursue their livelihoods. This is particularly true for regions that experience regular environmental and economic shocks. However, to date this level of analysis has been largely absent from impact studies. The purpose of this paper is to overcome this lack of contextual analysis by using Bangladesh as a pertinent example.

Drawing on empirical data and a wide range of literature from a variety of disciplines, including geography, development studies, economics and anthropology, the paper aims to provide an in‐depth analysis of the dual impact of flooding and microcredits in Bangladesh.

Over the last few years the use of preventive mitigation and coping strategies has declined in Bangladesh. The most widely cited reason for this is financial constraints as a result of declining rural incomes despite a large presence of MCOs in the country. In order to overcome cash shortages many people have resorted to borrowing from a variety of sources, which has become effectively the single most important coping strategy employed. In conjunction with lowered debt capacity and restrictive terms under which microcredits are disbursed, higher indebtedness, creating a potential for poverty traps, is the outcome.

For MCOs to be able to claim that their work alleviates poverty they have to demonstrate sensitivity towards the needs of their clients. Yet, the added risks imposed by recurring environmental stressors have been markedly absent from their studies. This paper proposes that the environmental context not only is important but also draws attention to some of the negative consequences that it can have on livelihood sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the dilemma of global sustainable economic development and poverty alleviation in the context of the environmental concerns.

A range of recently published literature focusing on the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) is reviewed. The arguments that are in favor and against the notion of poor being a “market” are examined. The implications of increased consumption by the poor even while the developed countries maintain their levels of consumption are discussed.

This paper argues that current levels of consumption by the developed world is not sustainable even as the world's poor begin to consume more to maintain a reasonable standard of living. New business models and models for sustainable development are called for.

Sustainable development is an extremely complex issue and it is impossible to address this complexity in a single article.

The paper challenges businesses to develop new business models that have more stringent constraints imposed on them.

This paper challenges the current norm of unbridled growth. The paper calls for academicians and practitioners to develop new models.

Currently, Malaysia uses the Poverty Line Income (PLI) to measure poverty. This is because income measurement is the easiest way to collect data, but in its simplicity, it fails to capture the broader meaning and implications of poverty. Asset index is one of the non-monetary poverty measurements which have been established by researchers but not used in measuring poverty in Malaysia. A household might be poor in income, but assets may prevent them from being trapped in poverty.

This study will reassess the poverty of 302 households in the Northern States of Malaysia using the asset index and also the current state of poverty incidence with change under asset index.

The results show that households in the Northern States of Malaysia are interpreted as being ‘poorer’ when poverty is measured using assets as opposed to income alone. Besides that, poverty incidence of Malay households, households living in urban area and households with middle-aged heads have high poverty incidence, while households with a head of households that is single and highly educated have low poverty incidence. The logistic regression analysis shows that the determinants of poverty incidence based on the asset index are Indian, Penang and Perak State, the age of the head of household, distance to the education centre from home.

This study shows the asset index measurement which have not been done in Malaysia. This will contribute to the improvement of poverty measurement of the country.

The concept of poverty traps based on a critical threshold that distinguishes transitory from chronic poverty gives rise to a crucial policy distinction between cargo nets and safety nets. While safety nets are designed to prevent the non‐poor and transitorily poor from falling into chronic poverty, cargo nets are meant to help those who fall below the critical threshold to help them climb out of chronic poverty. The study attempts to determine the factors that affect a beneficiary artisan's decision to use the toolkits provided, i.e. to climb up using the cargo net of improved toolkits and become more active economically.

The paper is based on primary data collected from the supply of improved toolkits to rural artisans (SITRA) programme in 2001‐2002. It is performed on the dataset consisting of 6,788 observations (beneficiary artisans). Due to some missing data 700 observations could not be used. Thus, only 6,088 observations are considered for the purpose of the ordered logit analysis.

The paper develops the related concepts of conditional and structural rigidities restraining the movement and studies the role of these rigidities in determining the economic mobility of a beneficiary household when a climbing cargo net is provided. The paper finds that there is strong evidence that governments are confused about the concept of poverty reduction and alleviation strategies. The study reveals that narrower targeting on beneficiaries with lower conditional rigidities is better as they are more likely to use the toolkits and hence increase their income from craftsmanship and so promote both economic growth and poverty reduction.

The study focuses on a specific poverty alleviation programme. The findings are restricted to a special economic group at all India level. Nonetheless, the study highlights that a thorough understanding of the conditional and structural rigidities faced by a beneficiary artisan and how these affect his economic behaviour would be very useful in both designing and implementation of poverty reduction programmes.

This paper will be of value to researchers, policy makers seeking to gain better understanding of targeting. The paper observes that appreciation of significant conditional rigidities are useful while designing programmes – particularly while targeting the beneficiaries – structural rigidities are more important while implementing and monitoring these programs.

Purpose – This chapter investigates vulnerability to poverty in the Republic of Haiti.

Methodology – We use a hierarchical modeling technique to allow the assessment and decomposition of vulnerability to poverty by exploiting the short-panel structure of nested data in a cross section.

Originality – Specifically, a three-level hierarchical model with a partially Bayesian restricted maximum likelihood is used in the estimation procedure. This is novel in this literature.

Findings – The decomposition method adopted in this chapter reveals that vulnerability in the Republic of Haiti is largely a rural phenomenon and is correlated negatively with schooling. The results also disclose the lack of equality in various aspects of circumstances or opportunities, including education, as the salient factor determining the status and level of vulnerability of households. Most importantly, among the different shocks affecting household's income, it is found that meso-level shocks are in general far more important than covariate shocks. This finding points to some interesting policy implications in terms of decentralizing policies and delegating more powers and providing better means to local governments to enhance household resilience to shocks and to alleviate their vulnerability to poverty.

When the labor supply schedule is bending forward at low wage levels, the average cost curve of firms does the same. This leads to the possibility of multiple equilibria, in particular for monopolists, thereby opening a broader range of options and keeping non‐profitable firms in business. However, the global maximum is always occuring along the negatively sloping segment of the labor supply. Therefore, total welfare is declining, except perhaps in the case of monopolists, when firms are pursuing a low‐wage strategy to expand output and profits, and are exploiting labor's subsistence needs to pay wages below the marginal product.

The paper aims to look into the implications of urban informality in Chris Abani's Graceland as represented in slum life and urban poverty as products of over urbanization and globalization, seeking to unravel multi-layers of the human side of the slum.

The paper examines slum life from a descriptive approach to highlight how people survive under poverty. The study of the culture of slums entails an analysis of the survival techniques and everyday practices of slum dwellers, the relations and patterns of behavior and the outcomes of the interplay between place, culture and power relations in such communities.

The urban slum dwellers utilize everyday forms of resistance which comprise a number of “low-profile techniques” to subvert state-imposed power structures and break the cycle of poverty.

Despite the relevance of a post-colonial approach to the texts, this paper is limited to the study of the impact of urban poverty on individuals.

The margin, represented in the urban poor, is brought into focus and perceived in a new light of empowerment which challenges alienating discourses.

The multidimensional vision of Nigeria in Abani's text highlights the cultural and economic impacts of multiculturalism, neocolonialism and globalization on the urban poor.

The paper formulates a framework for understanding the culture of the slum as a space of a peculiar nature, seeking to deconstruct a fixed view of slum life and poverty culture.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the internal mechanism of the deviation of targeted poverty alleviation under the condition of asymmetric information.

Introducing a traditional signaling game theory model with dynamic asymmetric information, this study uses a dataset covering 813 poor households from Southern Xinjiang, China, to theoretically and empirically study the effect of aspiration of the poor households on poverty alleviation.

First, there exists asymmetric information between the poor households and village leaders. Second, the “short, arbitrary and fast” poverty alleviation approach may quickly pull people out of poverty, but it may also nurture a dependency culture where poor households lose their aspiration and ability to escape poverty through their own efforts. Third, due to long lasting universal state support, poor households in the national designated poor counties are less able and ambitious to escape poverty by themselves than their counterparts living in the national nondesignated areas.

The research results show that pro-poor development policies should be upheld to improve the residual utility that can benefit all households as a result of the poverty alleviation campaign. Relevant policy recommendations are made for China's continuous effort to fight relative poverty beyond 2020.