Why Do People Stay Poor?*

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Balboni, Clare; Bandiera, Oriana; Burgess, Robin; Ghatak, Maitreesh; Heil, Anton
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjab045
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 785-844
• 关键词: poverty traps; persistent poverty; WELFARE DYNAMICS; ECONOMICS; industrialization; unemployment; EMPLOYMENT; impacts

摘要

There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent, or motivation. The poverty traps view emphasizes differences in opportunities that stem from access to wealth. To test these views, we exploit a large-scale, randomized asset transfer and an 11-year panel of 6,000 households who begin in extreme poverty. The setting is rural Bangladesh, and the assets are cows. The data support the poverty traps view-we identify a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets, take on better occupations (from casual labor in agriculture or domestic services to running small livestock businesses), and grow out of poverty. The reverse happens for those below the threshold. Structural estimation of an occupational choice model reveals that almost all beneficiaries are misallocated in the work they do at baseline and that the gains arising from eliminating misallocation would far exceed the program costs. Our findings imply that large transfers, which create better jobs for the poor, are an effective means of getting people out of poverty traps and reducing global poverty.