Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day Illustrated Edition, Kindle Edition

by Daryl Collins (Author), Jonathan Morduch (Author), Stuart Rutherford (Author), Format: Kindle Edition

90 ratings

Flip to back Flip to front

Audible Sample Playing... Paused You are listening to a sample of the Audible narration for this Kindle book.
Learn more

ISBN-13: 978-0691148199

ISBN-10: 0691148198

Why is ISBN important?

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers

from

Other Sellers

See all 7 versions

Buy

$15.63

eBook features:

Highlight, take notes, and search in the book
Length: 315 pages
Word Wise: Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled

Read with the free Kindle apps (available on iOS, Android, PC & Mac), Kindle E-readers and on Fire Tablet devices. See all supported devices

Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC

Digital List Price: $28.95 Save $13.32 (46%)‎

Enter a promotion code or Gift Card

Nearly forty percent of humanity lives on an average of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to systematically explain how the poor find solutions to their everyday financial problems.

The authors conducted year-long interviews with impoverished villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are often surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever possible, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available. Their experiences reveal new methods to fight poverty and ways to envision the next generation of banks for the "bottom billion."

Indispensable for those in development studies, economics, and microfinance, Portfolios of the Poor will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about poverty and what can be done about it.

Abhijit V. Banerjee
2,471
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99
Jonathan Morduch
61
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Amartya Sen
435
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $8.79
Jeffrey D. Sachs
443
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $10.99
Dean Karlan
62
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $12.99
Brian Fikkert
21
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $12.99

Create your FREE Amazon Business account to save up to 10% with Business-only prices and free shipping. Register today

Editorial Reviews

Review

This book is a major contribution to the understanding of the situation of the poor in developing countries and should be a 'must reading' for both academics and policymakers concerned with ways of improving developmental policies.

From the Inside Flap

"Too often, conversations about the needs of the world's poor are based on assumptions and clichés. This important, carefully researched, and compelling book presents the facts about the poor and their relationship to finance."--Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life

"This is an important, boots-on-the-ground look at how microfinance functions in the developing world. The descriptions of how poor households manage their limited resources are exciting, raw, and novel, and I found myself unable to put the book down."--Edward Miguel, University of California, Berkeley and coauthor of Economic Gangsters

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Veterans in economics and microfinance scrutinize the finances of the poor in India, Bangladesh and South Africa. Following their 250 subjects for a year, the researchers compile family financial diaries and report on how the poor spend money and the myriad resources that function like portfolios. A confluence of circumstances the authors term a triple whammy (low and unreliable income, irregular cash flows and financial instruments ill-suited to the needs of this population) makes saving essential, and the poor depend on savings clubs, insurance clubs, money guarders or microfinance institutions. It is often a piecemeal approach, and any emergency can have disastrous consequences. With the advent of Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976 and Grameen II in 2001, the growing global profile of microfinance might give the population more access to funds through reliable, flexible means—but the majority must turn to family, friends, neighbors or moneylenders. While the book's methodology and conclusions are fascinating, it is a complex and technical analysis best suited for those fluent in economics and public policy. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

Ten years ago, the authors of this unusual study began collecting detailed yearlong “financial diaries” from households in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa, with a focus on those living on less than two dollars a day per person. They found, to their surprise, that none of the families lived hand to mouth; even the poorest relied on complex combinations of financial strategies, including joining savings clubs, buying funeral insurance, and acting as “money guards” for neighbors. The diarists did things that might seem irrational—borrowing in order to save; paying interest on savings—but that made sense given their unpredictable incomes and limited options. While the authors do offer prescriptions for how to expand those options, it’s their scrupulous attention to actual behavior that makes this book invaluable.
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Daryl Collins is senior associate at Bankable Frontier Associates in Boston. Jonathan Morduch is professor of public policy and economics at New York University and coauthor of The Economics of Microfinance. Stuart Rutherford is the founder of SafeSave, a microfinance institution in Bangladesh. Orlanda Ruthven recently completed a doctoral degree in international development at the University of Oxford, and currently lives in Delhi. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A must-read book for social entrepreneurs combating global poverty. . . . Skip the latest road-to-riches screed about serving the bottom of the pyramid and throw out your white papers from the World Bank. . . . Portfolios of the Poor is your new bible."―Jonathan C. Lewis, I on Poverty

"Too often, conversations about the needs of the world's poor are based on assumptions and clichés. This important, carefully researched, and compelling book presents the facts about the poor and their relationship to finance."―Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life

"This is an important, boots-on-the-ground look at how microfinance functions in the developing world. The descriptions of how poor households manage their limited resources are exciting, raw, and novel, and I found myself unable to put the book down."―Edward Miguel, University of California, Berkeley and coauthor of Economic Gangsters --This text refers to the paperback edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003TSEL14
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press; Illustrated edition (April 20, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 20, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4577 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 315 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #800,234 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #272 in Poverty Studies
- #340 in Development & Growth Economics (Kindle Store)
- #697 in Economic Policy & Development (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
90 ratings

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Daryl Collins
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
See more on the author's page
Jonathan Morduch
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Jonathan Morduch is an economist at New York University. He writes about the financial lives of low-income families and how they connect to poverty and inequality.
Morduch teaches on international development economics, but his most recent book, The Financial Diaries (with Rachel Schneider), tells the stories of families in the United States.
Morduch is Executive Director of the Financial Access Initiative at NYU, and a professor of public policy and economics at NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
website: https://wp.nyu.edu/jmorduch/
See more on the author's page

Customer reviews

5 star		57%
4 star		30%
3 star		7%
2 star		5%
1 star		2%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

D. P. S. Chubert

A perspective shifter

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2021

Verified Purchase

For the past ten years, I've read a good bit for a layman about macro phenomena- capital flows, economic crisis and regional development. When I read micro-economics, it was usually about the interaction between bad behavior- scams, over-consumption, indulgent individual decision making- in the developed world. I picked this book up thinking I'd learn something about micro development conditions in poor countries, where my knowledge was a little creaky.

By the time I'd put the book down I'd taken some steps toward that goal. But far more valuable than that, I had caught a glimpse into lives that I'd unconsciously taken as deeply alien to my own. After all, these lives were so materially deprived compared to mine. They must have a profoundly different, probably somehow desensitized consciousness? Absolutely absolutely shame on me. Far from the dehumanized picture I'd held, this book depicts people who are much like me- they have day-to-day joy, they suffer anxiety when thinking about their children's future, depression at the death of a loved one, just as I do. The differences between them and me are external, circumstantial and experiential, and completely not essential. Compared to them I am fabulously wealthy, and so I'm not faced with the grinding, day tp day challenges to the survival of my family. But this book has allowed me to imagine how I would respond emotionally and spiritually to such circumstances, and more importantly to admire and empathise all the more with people who actually face these challenges.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Understanding the daily reality of global poverty

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of global poverty.

Portfolios of the Poor reports the findings of a series of detailed, year-long studies of the day-to-day financial practices of some 250 families in India, Bangladesh, and South Africa, including both city-dwellers and villagers. The authors conducted monthly, face-to-face interviews with each family, focusing on money management and recording every penny spent, earned, or borrowed in ¡°diaries¡± that formed the principal source for their observations. In the process, they made discoveries that will surely be surprising to some readers:
¡öThe poor rarely live from hand to mouth. ¡°[N]o matter where we looked, we found that most of the households, even those living on less than one dollar a day per person, rarely consume every penny of income as soon as it is earned. They seek, instead, to ¡®manage¡¯ their money by saving when they can and borrowing when they need to.¡±
¡öLack of money is just one of the financial characteristics of poverty. It¡¯s equally important that poor people¡¯s income is both unpredictable and irregular. Crops come in two or three times a year, yielding whatever the weather may permit and the market may bear; between-times a family may have no cash income at all. A son might get a job for a day but not again for a week or a month. Illness or injury may interrupt a family¡¯s income. And so forth.
¡öRather than helpless victims of their poverty, the authors found, the poor are remarkably sophisticated about the financial circumstances of their lives. ¡°We came to see that money management is, for the poor, a fundamental and well-understood part of everyday life.¡±
¡öMicrolending is just one of the financial services needed by the poor to lift themselves out of poverty. ¡°[W]e saw that at almost every turn poor households are frustrated by the poor quality ¡ª above all the low reliability ¡ª of the instruments that they use to manage their meager incomes. This made us realize that if poor households enjoyed assured access to a handful of better financial tools, their chances of improving their lives would surely be much higher.¡±
¡öMost observers regard money-lenders as simply a scourge of the poor, as they are so very often. However, given the dearth of mainstream money-management alternatives, there are many circumstances in which it¡¯s logical for poor people to turn to money-lenders for short-term cash loans. ¡°One of the lessons from the diaries is that interest paid on very short-duration loans is more sensibly understood as a fee than as annualized interest.¡±

Scholars, activists, and policymakers alike have quarreled over the question of global poverty and what to do about it for more than half a century. More often than not, the disputes they air in official policy debates, in the news media, and in scholarly journals are grounded in statistics developed by the United Nations and the World Bank ¡ª figures that usually represent worldwide averages. Therein lies much of the trouble.

The most widely accepted benchmark for world poverty today is $2 a day per person, as determined by the World Bank. However, you have to dig deeply before you can understand what the World Bank and the United Nations actually mean by ¡°$2 a day.¡± They¡¯re not referring to those two one-dollar bills you may have crumpled up in your pocket or purse. To correct for economic differences from one country to another, they use the concept of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).

In theory, PPP takes into consideration the sharp differences in how much $2 will buy in any given country as compared to the global norm. But in practice the experts have widely differing views on what method should be used to calculate PPP and, in effect, what is the global norm. As if that isn¡¯t bad enough, the most commonly used techniques to calculate PPP are based on each country¡¯s economy-wide standard of living. In other words, the definition of poverty might depend in part on the price of big-screen TV sets and BMWs or their equivalent. In hopes of correcting that problem, scholars have been writing papers for several years about ¡°poverty-based PPP,¡± excluding anything but goods and services commonly demanded by people living at subsistence level, but none of the approaches they¡¯ve proposed has yet been officially adopted.

The whole question of PPP, then, is so confusing ¡ª and so confused ¡ª that the authors of Portfolios of the Poor have rejected the concept. They base all their calculations simply on the prevailing exchange rates between local currencies and the U. S. dollar. To which I say, amen.

The four co-authors of this book are an intriguing bunch. Two are men and two women. (Daryl Collins, the lead author, is female.) All four are products of elite universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, though only one, Jonathan Morduch, is currently an academic. Morduch teaches development economics at NYU¡¯s Wagner School of Public Policy in New York; he is an expert in microfinance. Daryl Collins, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven are all development practitioners with practical field experience ¡ª Collins with a Boston-based global consultancy, Rutherford with a microfinance institution he founded in Bangladesh, and Ruthven with DFID, the UK equivalent of USAID.

[...]

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Zack Polizzi

... very excited to gain an understanding of what it's like to live on $2 a day

Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2018

Verified Purchase

I was very excited to gain an understanding of what it's like to live on $2 a day. I was expecting a series of in depth personal accounts of families, interspersed with higher level explanations of trends seen more broadly. Instead this book was almost entirely a dense collection of analysis and statistics, and I didn't feel like I understand the lives of these individuals any better. At best this book was misbranded - called "portfolios" but really lacking anything of the sort.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

... the finances and expenditures of the poorest of the poor. This book would be of great help to ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

It provides in-depth knowledge of the finances and expenditures of the poorest of the poor. This book would be of great help to development workers, aid agencies and government development departments. It is amazing how the poor manage their finances. Knowledge of their financial situation is a challenge to all to do more and reform the financial aid structures of international aid agencies and governments; moreover, the conditions of these financial aid must be looked into and revised for the benefit of the poor. Is it fair to charge the poor of the loan or financial aid they get from financial institutions?

Rebecca De Simone

Important and enjoyable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 16, 2020

Verified Purchase

This is such an engaging book. And it has really had a big impact on the field of micro finance, both in its academic and practical applications.

Grace Ascuasiati

Excellent detailed study

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 5, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is full of insights about the economy of poor family in different cultural contexts. A must if you are working with microfinances, third world, and development related projects.

Daniel Rozas

Must read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 23, 2009

Verified Purchase

For anyone working in the microfinance industry, making donations to microfinance and similar organizations, or simply interested in poverty alleviation, this is a must read. A seminal work that sweeps away long-held (and incorrect) generalizations and replaces them with facts: how do the world's poor REALLY manage to get by on their small and irregular incomes?

Here, you meet real people in real-world situations, using real tools available to the poor in developing countries for managing their money. The results can be truly surprising (people regularly taking money OUT of their bank accounts and investing in informal and sometimes risky savings clubs, people PAYING interest for the privilege of being able to save, etc.), but they become understandable when you see the full picture of the financial needs of the poor and what's available to them to manage their money.

Reading this, you can't help but realize that microcredit is but a minor contribution to unmet market needs. The poor need so much more -- savings accounts, insurance, long-term loans, revolving credit. And those preaching that microcredit should be made available only to microentrepreneurs should think again. This study makes it clear that financial services are needed across the board - to business owners and regular folk.

9 people found this helpful

Arkan Caglayan

A Must Read!

Reviewed in Germany on July 17, 2020

Verified Purchase

Very Informative. A recommended read!

See all reviews

Abhijit V. Banerjee
2,471
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99
Daron Acemoglu
4,260
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $14.99

Report an issue

Does this item contain inappropriate content?

Report

Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?

Report

Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?

Report

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day Illustrated Edition, Kindle Edition

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the Inside Flap

From Publishers Weekly

From the Back Cover

From The New Yorker

About the Author

Review

Product details

About the authors

Daryl Collins

Jonathan Morduch

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Customers who viewed this item also viewed