A review by haagedoorn
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

4.0

An interesting, more technical read on the basic economics that drive development. The authors cover a wide spectrum of topics, with two over-arching themes ''Private Lives'' and ''Institutions. The former focuses primarily on the personal experience of the world's poor (what are their motivations? Their expectations? Their reasoning when it comes to food and family planning), whereas the latter focuses the often cited importance of institutions. The book makes a rightful claim about this latter being vague. What is an institution? Is it the ''government'' and thus political, or is it economical? Within this chapter, the main emphasis lies on a few smaller topics, to really break this question on institutions down. Micro-credit, entrepreneurship, policymaking/bureacracy, financial savings and insurance are the most important ones. Based on looking at these topics, how they are provided for, for poor people (defined as those living on 99 cents a day or less) the authors offer a very interesting insight, placing themselves in the middle between the Easterly vs. Sachs development debate. In the end, they break it down to five rationalizations on why the poor are poor. I won't go into detail what these are, that's what the book is for. My personal opinion on the book however, is quite positive. Despite becoming a bit too technical for me here and there (which is more a lack of economic knowledge on my part), the book makes a clear point for incremental change at the local level, rather than global sweeping changes within development. It is an interesting nuance of both the pessimist Easterly and optimist Sachs and therefore a good read for anyone remotely interested in global development.