Product Description

About forty percent of the world's people live on incomes 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 explain systematically how the poor find solutions.

The authors report on the yearlong "financial diaries" of 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11966 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

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.

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.
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Review
Ten years ago, the authors of this unusual study began collecting detailed yearlong 'financial diaries' from households in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa. . . . 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.
(New Yorker )

The book's methodology and conclusions are fascinating.
(Publishers Weekly )

A fascinating new book
(Nicholas D. Kristof New York Times "On the Ground" )

The research provides evidence of the sophistication with which poor people think about their finances.
(The Economist )

A refreshingly distinct path. Portfolios of the Poor . . . avoid[s] the big picture and zoom[s] in on the basics of daily poverty, exploring how poor families manage their money. . . . The diaries reveal a 'real, ongoing, and substantial demand' for better financial services, which poor families need to provide better health care and schooling for their children. . . . Rather than waiting for the world to debate and accept their ideas, these authors have taken them up on their own. In the war against global poverty, that feels like one small battle won.
(Carlos Lozada Washington Post )

This is a very interesting book, which examines the quite sophisticated financial system developed by poor households to adjust their spending relative to their income.
(Choice )

A masterly assessment of the financial needs of people on very low incomes . . . stuffed full of interesting and surprising insights, and should be read by anyone concerned with economic development and poverty reduction. I can't praise it highly enough. This is a model of the careful collection of evidence with important practical consequences.
(Diane Coyle The Enlightened Economist )

A good overview of how the world's poor intersect with financial institutions at the micro level.
(Tyler Cowen Marginal Revolution )

Customer Reviews

Brilliant approach to analyzing seemingly-impenetrable issues
I opened "Portfolios of the Poor" feeling dubious: multiple-authored works usually feel like the proverbial camel stitched together by a committee. And what's this about the world's poorest--who we all KNOW don't have anything resembling financial savvy--having "portfolios?" Within a few pages I was completely hooked, and since finishing this masterful work I can't stop pondering--and talking with friends & colleagues about--its many powerful insights.

Rather than the usual 30,000-foot opining about The Poor, the authors spent more than a year actually living in, and closely observing residents of, some of the earth's most wretched slums. Their experiences, as reported honestly and respectfully here, will profoundly affect your views of poverty--and of what we can do to help. I won't scoop the authors' ably-told tales, nor their eminently sensible recommendations. This is the first book I've read in a long, long time that has fundamentally changed my thinking on questions of international development. Read it!

The Poor, Smooth Operators
How the poor spend wisely | Smooth operators | The Economist
Page 82, May 16, 2009 ... Even those with very little money have a sophisticated approach to finance.

[...]

Smooth operators
May 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition, page 82

Even those with very little money have a sophisticated approach to finance


PAYING interest on your savings will strike most people as odd. Yet some poor people in the developing world do just that. In West Africa, for example, some people pay roving susu collectors a fee amounting to a -40% annual interest rate for looking after their deposits.

And the authors of a new book, Portfolios of the Poor, about the financial lives of people who earn less than $2 a day find that this sort of "pay-to-save" model is by no means unique to Africa. They encounter a similar phenomenon in India, where a female deposit collector called Jyothi looks after small savings for people in the slums of Vijayawada, at an effective yearly interest rate of -30%.

Some of Jyothi's customers are among the 250 families in South Africa, India and Bangladesh whose financial transactions over a year were recorded to study how very poor people manage their resources. Given that these are so meagre, this might seem to be an unpromising line of inquiry. But as many of the subjects emphasised, controlling the flow of cash becomes all the more critical when income is not just low, but also unpredictable and irregular.

These features are what economists like to call "consumption smoothing"--spreading spending out in a way that ensures that what you eat one day is not determined by what you have earned that day or the day before. The subjects used a combination of loans and savings to ensure that their lives were not, literally, hostage to fortune. Hardly anyone lived utterly hand-to-mouth.

The research provides evidence of the sophistication with which poor people think about their finances. They are acutely aware, for example, of the importance of some psychological phenomena whose effects behavioural economists have only recently begun to explore. For instance, they purposefully seek out commitments to help ensure that they meet their saving goals. Many of the South African women in the study joined several monthly "savings clubs" in spite of having bank accounts. They found that the extra discipline the clubs provided was valuable in itself, because it compelled them to save no matter what.

Some went further. The mother of a Bangladeshi man who found himself unable to stick to his monthly saving goal found she could make him save more by taking out a loan from a microfinance company. The shared obligation of having to pay the regular loan instalments meant he abandoned his spendthrift ways.

The unbanked do not have access to such luxuries as standing orders, which richer people use to overcome the temptation to spend whatever they earn. And they are forced to pay for things that are free for most--which enables women like Jyothi to earn a crust by offering a safe store for small savings. But with some ingenuity, they use unorthodox financial instruments to create a more stable life than their erratic incomes would otherwise allow.

Thoughtful, provocative, and insightful. A must read!
Having worked in economic development for some time now, I have grown accustomed to studies concerning the use of capital by the global poor being stated in simply academic terms. Portfolios of the Poor though, brings the human element back into economics and gives a more intuitive understanding of the financial challenges that people face in their daily lives. Funerals, weddings, failed health, loss of employment, religious celebrations, purchase of a new home... all of these require significant investments and require diverse access to capital. This book not only describes how people react to those challenges, but also how they prepare for them beforehand with multilayered portfolios of equity and debt. Whether it be personal assets, rotating savings groups, or relationships with informal lenders, people all over the world use thoughtful and complex approaches to accessing capital when formal financial services are inaccessible. The authors' use of financial diaries prepared by struggling families in Asia and Africa proves that millions of individuals are prepared for the risks and rewards of financial services if they were only tailored to their needs. There is so much more that financial institutions can do, and this study is a significant building block in understanding how to develop financial products for even the poorest of the poor. Thanks for such a great book, and I hope to see more work like this.

One last comment - I don't think there's a single equation in the whole book! Finally, economics without algebra... it's like heaven.