Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo published an interesting excerpt from their research titled, "More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World: But what if the experts are wrong?" in the May/June 2011 issue of Foreign Policy.
"Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We've also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What we've found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn't necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.
"But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage."
Read the whole article
or get their book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty from Amazon or other booksellers.
