Year Published
- 2008 (0)
- 2009 (5) Apply 2009 filter
- 2010 (0)
- 2011 (0)
- 2012 (0)
- 2013 (0)
- 2014 (0)
- 2015 (0)
- (-) Remove 2016 filter 2016
- (-) Remove 2017 filter 2017
- 2018 (1) Apply 2018 filter
- 2019 (2) Apply 2019 filter
- 2020 (0)
- 2021 (0)
Research Topics
Populations
Types of Research
- Data Analysis (1) Apply Data Analysis filter
- Literature Review (3) Apply Literature Review filter
- Portfolio Review (0)
- Research Brief (0)
Geography
- (-) Remove East Africa Region and Selected Countries filter East Africa Region and Selected Countries
- Global (1) Apply Global filter
- South Asia Region and Selected Countries (4) Apply South Asia Region and Selected Countries filter
- Southern Africa Region and Selected Countries (1) Apply Southern Africa Region and Selected Countries filter
- Sub-Saharan Africa (2) Apply Sub-Saharan Africa filter
- (-) Remove West Africa Region and Selected Countries filter West Africa Region and Selected Countries
Dataset
- ASTI (0)
- FAOSTAT (0)
- Farmer First (0)
- LSMS & LSMS-ISA (1) Apply LSMS & LSMS-ISA filter
- Other Datasets (1) Apply Other Datasets filter
Current search
- (-) Remove Household Well-Being & Equity filter Household Well-Being & Equity
- (-) Remove 2016 filter 2016
- (-) Remove 2017 filter 2017
- (-) Remove Political Economy & Governance filter Political Economy & Governance
- (-) Remove West Africa Region and Selected Countries filter West Africa Region and Selected Countries
- (-) Remove East Africa Region and Selected Countries filter East Africa Region and Selected Countries
- (-) Remove Poverty filter Poverty
Donor countries and multilateral organizations may pursue multiple goals with foreign aid, including supporting low-income country development for strategic/security purposes (national security, regional political stability) and for short-and long-term economic interests (market development and access, local and regional market stability). While the literature on the effectiveness of aid in supporting progress on different indicators of country development is inconclusive, donors are interested in evidence that aid funding is not permanent but rather contributes to a process by which recipient countries develop to a point that they are economically self-sufficient. In this report, we review the literature on measures of country self-sufficiency and descriptive evidence from illustrative case studies to explore conditions associated with transitions toward self-sufficiency in certain contexts.
In this report, we analyze the evidence that improved and expanded access to financial services can be a pathway out of poverty in Bangladesh and Tanzania. A brief background review of finance and poverty reduction evidence at the country, household, and individual level emphasizes the importance of a functioning financial system and the need to remove individual and household barriers to capital accumulation. We follow with an in-depth literature review on studies that link poverty reduction in Bangladesh or Tanzania with one or more of five financial intervention categories: remittances; government subsidies; conditional and unconditional cash transfers; credit; and combination programs. The resulting empirical evidence from these sources reveal a high share (61%) of positive reported associations between a financial intervention and outcome measure related to our five chosen financial interventions. The remaining studies found insignificant or mixed associations, but very few (3 out of 56) indicate that access to a financial mechanism was associated with worsened poverty. The heterogeneity of study types and interventions makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the efficacy of one intervention over another, and more research is needed on whether such approaches constitute a durable, long-term exit from poverty.
Common aid allocation formulas incorporate measures of income per capita but not measures of poverty, likely based on the assumption that rising average incomes are associated with reduced poverty. If declining poverty is the outcome of interest, however, the case of Nigeria illustrates that such aid allocation formulas could lead to poorly targeted or inefficient aid disbursements. Using data from the World Bank and the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics, we find that while the relationship between economic growth and poverty in Nigeria varies depending on the time period studied, overall from 1992-2009 Nigeria’s poverty rate has only declined by 6% despite a 70% increase in per capita gross domestic product (GDP). A review of the literature indicates that income inequality, the prominence of the oil sector, unemployment, corruption, and poor education and health in Nigeria may help to explain the pattern of high ongoing poverty rates in the country even in the presence of economic growth. Our analysis is limited by substantial gaps in the availability of quality data on measures of poverty and economic growth in Nigeria, an issue also raised in the literature we reviewed, but our findings support arguments that economic growth should not be assumed to lead to poverty reduction and that the relationship between these outcomes likely depends on contextual factors.