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Combining rural household data and China’s expressway network, this paper estimates the causal effect of expressway access on rural household income using propensity score matching and difference-in-differences method. Our empirical results showed that access to expressways does not, on average, benefit rural households, but further evidence revealed a heterogeneous effect. Improved expressway access can promote poor rural households’ per capita net income by 23.0%, in comparison to the non-poor. Supporting evidence suggests that expressway access encourages rural–urban migration, especially for the poor rural workers, which ultimately leads to higher income for this group. These findings highlight the effects of expressway access on the reduction of rural poverty.

In this paper, we focus on foreign aid-effectiveness in developing aid-recipient countries. By disaggregating total aid into sub-categories, we develop a model in which aid affects the welfare of the poor, as measured by a human development index. Our estimates (robust for different specifications) show that an increase in aid to the agricultural sector, one of our aid sub-categories, can improve the welfare of the poor, both directly and indirectly, through pro-poor public expenditure. Accordingly, more attention to the agricultural sector and reversing the decline in agricultural aid may improve the overall effectiveness of aid and achieve a sustainable transition out of poverty by increasing aggregate welfare.

This paper attempts to explain why China performed better than India in reducing poverty. As two of the most populous countries in the world, China and India have both experienced fast economic growth and high inequality in the past four decades. Conversely, China adopted a more export-oriented development strategy, resulting in faster industrialization or urbanization and deeper globalization, than India. Consequently, to conduct the comparative study, we first decompose poverty changes into a growth and an inequality components, assessing the relative importance of growth versus distributional changes on poverty in China and India. Then, Chinese data are used to estimate the impacts of industrialization, urbanization and globalization on poverty reduction in rural China. The major conclusion of this comparative study is that developing countries must prioritize employment generation in secondary and tertiary industries through industrialization and globalization in order to absorb surplus agricultural labor, helping reduce poverty in the rural areas.

Economic growth necessitates the development of human capital and education. It plays a critical and necessary role in the formulation of income distribution policies and alleviating poverty. This study investigates the relationship through ordinary least square (OLS), fully-modified OLS and dynamic OLS models using panel data from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries from 1990 to 2018. According to the findings, imbalance plays an important role in influencing poverty and concludes that the government should embrace procedures that help improve pay distribution to reduce poverty at the strategy level. Furthermore, the findings state that a bi-directional Granger causality exists between schooling and poverty. In terms of strategy, SAARC countries should continue to increase the proportion of sustainable energy used for financial development, thereby decreasing the use of fossil energy for environmental improvements. Additionally, this study shows that the association of pay disparity hoses the positive effect of financial development on poverty, and it supports the contention that the degree of imbalance reduces the impact of comprehensiveness. Pay disparity is now a critical determinant of poverty.

This study examines the role of energy security in poverty reduction in the 12 poorest Asian economies from 2000 to 2019. We postulated an energy security index using principal component analysis. We adopted the system generalized method of a moment technique to manage endogeneity and dynamism in the model. For robustness, we applied a panel-corrected standard error (PCSE). We found a negative relationship between energy security and poverty reduction, suggesting that energy security helps reduce poverty. We conclude that energy security promotes sustainable poverty alleviation and recommends feed-in tariffs, net metering, tax credits, and energy resource diversification away from fossil fuels.

On a worldwide basis, microfinance institutions (MFIs) provide financial services to the poorest households. To date, funding of MFI activities has come primarily from outright donor grants, government subsidies, and often debt capital, including debt with non-market terms favorable to the MFI. These traditional sources of MFI financing may not be sufficient to allow MFIs to provide maximum services. There is a subset of the pool of mainstream equity investors who would consider investing in MFI opportunities, even knowing that they would not expect to earn the full economic rate of return that such investments would otherwise require. However, as part of their investment evaluation process, these investors would ask: What would the market determined required expected rate of return for my MFI investment be? What return on investment (ROI) do I expect to earn on my MFI investment? Is the difference in the above two returns acceptable given my level of social motivation? How will I "monetize" my investment and when? The purpose of this article is to employ modern corporate finance techniques to address these questions.

This study looks at the relationship between the success of microfinance institutions and the degree of economic freedom in their host countries. Many microfinance institutions are currently not self-sustaining, and both theoretical and empirical work suggests that the economic environment in which they operate is an important factor in their ability to reach this goal, furthering the mission of outreach to the poor. The sustainability of the microfinance institutions is analyzed here using a large cross-section of institutions and countries. The results show that microfinance institutions operate primarily in countries with a relatively low degree of overall economic freedom and that government intervention in the economy can reduce their sustainability.

Poverty is the biggest problem standing in the way of economic development and political stability in the Mekong River sub-region. Multilateral poverty reduction cooperation in this sub-region has long been focused on stimulating economic growth through increased investment and foreign aid in such areas as environmental protection, health care, education, and vocational training. As a relatively new cooperative platform, the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) mechanism has played an increasingly prominent role in sub-regional economic development and integration; and a joint task force has been set up to draw up multilateral initiatives and plans better tailored to local conditions and needs. Nonetheless, the LMC must increase its relevance and effectiveness in poverty reduction by complementing and coordinating with other existing sub-regional programs amid intensifying power competition in the broad Indo-Pacific region, while taking into account different national development philosophies as well as rising environmental and resource concerns.

Antenatal care can help children from poor families get a good start to their lives and thus avoid the transmission of intergenerational poverty. Therefore, this chapter argues that focusing on the provision of antenatal care for children from poor families is the right place to start if your objective is to reduce poverty. The Chinese government has launched a program which aims to reduce maternal mortality and tetanus in newborns. This program plays a similar role to that of antenatal care. However, women living in pastoral areas in Yushu and Guoluo (the two Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures in Qinghai Province) do not sufficiently use antenatal care. Based on information collected through fieldwork, this chapter will try to find out the reasons behind this pattern of behavior, as well as understand the policy implications of this phenomenon.

Life without poverty is a top priority of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While research on poverty reduction has generated knowledge on the nature, antecedents, and effects of poverty (e.g. Alkire and Santos, 2014; Sen, 1981), as well as the management and governance of anti-poverty initiatives (e.g. Zhou et al., 2018), the challenges of poverty reduction have received relatively little attention in the innovation literature. The gap is notable because of the paradox of prosperity, which refers to the problem that the current approach to poverty reduction relies on the “trickle down” effect of economic development, ignoring the fact that economic development doesn’t naturally alleviate poverty via “trickle down” effects. Instead, increasing prosperity tends to concentrate into the hands of a few members of society (Foroohar, 2016). As a result, economic development often fails to generate sustainable prosperity, and even exacerbates the problem in some cases (Christensen et al., 2019). Resolving the prosperity paradox hinges on increasing the inclusivity of innovation eco-systems because innovation is a key driver of economic development. If innovation eco-systems are more inclusive, then the prosperity of those innovations are more likely to be broadly shared (George et al., 2012a). Accordingly, we draw from several theoretical perspectives to propose a novel Anti-Poverty Innovation (API) approach that empowers the “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BoP) individuals through innovation, meeting UNSDGs of poverty reduction, endogenous development, and community prosperity. Overall, this research generates new insights on innovation, the prosperity paradox, and poverty reduction to contribute to the achievement of inclusive global sustainable development.

This chapter aims to provide a critical examination of the China Model of development. This chapter has three parts: first, a discussion what the major characteristics of the China Model are and why it is attractive to developing countries; second, an argument that researchers should not take the China Model for granted as its constituents are highly contested, and the term “Beijing Consensus” ironically belies the fact that there is no consensus on how to characterize China's developmental experience over the past thirty years; third, an analysis of the implications of the China Model for developing countries by examining the following three questions: (1) How can researchers move beyond the ideological fault line in the China field? (2) Why does the China Model work while other models such as neoliberalism and state socialism fail? (3) Can the China Model be copied?