Shahidur R. Khandker - Böcker

The Handbook on Poverty and Inequality provides tools to measure, describe, monitor, evaluate, and analyze poverty. It provides background materials for designing poverty reduction strategies. This book is intended for researchers and policy analysts involved in poverty research and policy making. The Handbook began as a series of notes to support training courses on poverty analysis and gradually grew into a 16-chapter book. Now the Handbook consists of explanatory text with numerous examples, interspersed with multiple-choice questions (to ensure active learning) and combined with extensive practical exercises using Stata statistical software.

Rural energy's importance to the Bangladesh economy cannot be underestimated. The problems rural people face in obtaining safe, clean, and reliable energy supplies are not minor inconveniences. People are cooking with biomass fuels including large amounts of leaves and grass that expose them harmful indoor air pollution. They light with kerosene or sometimes candles which give off a dim light that hampers studying and reading in the evening. Finally, rural productivity suffers because of lack of access to modern energy. However, the picture also is not all bleak. This study underscores how improved access to rural energy services can created multiple benefits for rural life - from income and labor productivity to education and women's health. Recommended or enhancement of programs for improved stoves, rural electrification, renewable energy and greater access to commercial liquid fuels can significantly improve both the rural productivity and enhance the quality of life in rural Bangladesh.

Public programs are designed to reach certain goals and beneficiaries. Methods to understand whether such programs actually work, as well as the level and nature of impacts on intended beneficiaries, are main themes of this book. Has the Grameen Bank, for example, succeeded in lowering consumption poverty among the rural poor in Bangladesh? Can conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Latin America improve health and schooling outcomes for poor women and children? Does a new road actually raise welfare in a remote area in Tanzania, or is it a 'highway to nowhere'?This book reviews quantitative methods and models of impact evaluation. It begins by reviewing the basic issues pertaining to an evaluation of an intervention to reach certain targets and goals. It then focuses on the experimental design of an impact evaluation, highlighting its strengths and shortcomings, followed by discussions on various non-experimental methods. The authors also cover methods to shed light on the nature and mechanisms by which different participants are benefiting from the program.For researchers interested in learning how to use these models with statistical software, the book also provides STATA exercises in the context of evaluating major microcredit programs in Bangladesh, such as the Grameen Bank. The framework presented in this book can be very useful for strengthening local capacity in impact evaluation among technicians and policymakers in charge of formulating, implementing, and evaluating programs to alleviate poverty and underdevelopment.

Agricultural development through crop diversification, irrigation, high yielding crop varieties, and public investments in infrastructure has improved food security and its seasonal dimension worldwide in recent years. Consequently, the severity of seasonal hunger caused by agricultural crop cycles has lessened substantially. Yet in agricultural pockets scattered throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, seasonal hunger persists, especially among the rural poor, owing primarily to idiosyncratic shocks caused by agricultural seasonality. More than four-fifths of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for livelihoods. Because of seasonal income shocks, the poor who are generally poor are likely to be even poorer during a particular agricultural season, while those who are not poor year-round may also be so during that season. Also, seasonal hunger may lead to endemic poverty if its adverse effects on income and consumption are irreversible. Policies aimed at reducing overall poverty often disregard its seasonal dimension, because standard poverty statistics do not consider seasonal hunger in the official data collection and analysis, there is no direct way to determine how many of the “bottom billion,” as economist Paul Collier refers to the world’s poorest people, suffer from seasonal hunger. Even worse, regions prone to severe seasonal hunger are unlikely to attract the public investments required to raise the local economy’s resilience through income diversification and thus break the seasonal-poverty cycle.The book provides an exhaustive inquiry of Bangladesh’s seasonal hunger with special reference to the North West region. The seasonality of poverty and food deprivation is a common feature of rural livelihood but it is more marked in the north-west region of Bangladesh. The book also presents an evaluation of several policy interventions launched recently in mitigating seasonality, which provide a test case of what works and what does not in combating seasonal hunger. The major findings of the book are the following: (a) Policies to improve food security should explicitly take into account the seasonal dimension of food deprivation. (b) Gains from initiatives to combat seasonal hunger should be monitored and consolidated to ensure sustainable impacts. (c) Policies should also focus on areas that, owing to environmental degradation and climate change, are increasingly vulnerable to seasonal hunger and food insecurity in general.|Agricultural development through crop diversification, irrigation, high yielding crop varieties, and public investments in infrastructure has improved food security and its seasonal dimension worldwide in recent years. Consequently, the severity of seasonal hunger caused by agricultural crop cycles has lessened substantially. Yet in agricultural pockets scattered throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, seasonal hunger persists, especially among the rural poor, owing primarily to idiosyncratic shocks caused by agricultural seasonality. The book provides an exhaustive inquiry of Bangladesh’s seasonal hunger with special reference to the northwest region, where it is more pronounced. It also presents an evaluation of several policy interventions launched recently in mitigating seasonality, which provide a test case of what works and what does not in combating seasonal hunger. The major findings of the book are: (a) Policies to improve food security should explicitly take into account the seasonal dimension of food deprivation. (b) Gains from initiatives to combat seasonal hunger should be monitored and consolidated to ensure sustainable impacts, and (c) Policies should also focus on areas that, owing to environmental degradation and climate change, are increasingly vulnerable to seasonal hunger and food insecurity in general.

Bangladesh has the world's fastest growing, off-grid solar home system (SHS) coverage. In the past decade, the number of SHS installations has risen phenomenally–from a five-year target of 50,000 in 2003 to 50,000 a month in 2013, with support from the World Bank and other development partners. Even so, only 10 percent of off-grid households have been reached, suggesting ample room for continued expansion. Given the recent surge in SHS adoption, a key policy issue is whether the partial subsidy provided under the current program, implemented by the Infrastructure Development Company Limited (IDCOL), should be continued.Surge in Solar Powered Homes: Off-Grid Experience in Bangladesh assesses the country's remarkable growth in SHS, its support schemes, and the welfare impacts for rural households, using both large-scale household survey and institutional data. The book's findings clearly demonstrate that the social benefits from SHS adoption far exceed the cost of the subsidy. Within the current market incentive structure, there is tremendous scope for broadening the rural market reach. But the high upfront cost of purchasing a SHS at current market prices is a barrier to future sales, suggesting the continued need for IDCOL's well-targeted, subsidized operation.