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Jonathan Morduch
Jonathan Morduch is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and Executive Director of the Financial Access Initiative (www.financialaccess.org), a consortium of researchers focused on financial inclusion. His research centers on microfinance, social investment, and the economics of poverty.
Morduch is co-author of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton 2009) and The Economics of Microfinance (MIT Press, 2nd edition 2010). Morduch has worked with the United Nations and World Bank, and advises global NGOs. Morduch holds a BA from Brown and Ph.D. from Harvard, both in Economics. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in December 2008 in recognition of his work on microfinance.
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India’s poverty rate does not measure what you think it does
Like all national poverty rates, India’s poverty rate is interpreted as the share of the population that is poor in a given year. In this post, Merfeld and Morduch argue that, in practice, India’s poverty rate is better thought of as the approximate fraction of the year that households experience poverty. They describe how this is rooted in the nature of data collection, and how it changes understandings of poverty and policy in the country.
Why some poverty-fighting programmes show no net impact
An increasingly popular way to tackle acute poverty is ‘targeting the ultra-poor’. The scheme provides not only money but also training and support and has been hailed a huge success in its origin country Bangladesh. But this column evaluates a copycat scheme in southern India and finds that the gains are met by losses elsewhere and that, overall, the effect is minimal.