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The Chronic Poverty Report on Growth aims to put in front of economic policymakers in developing countries and international agencies evidence about the type of growth and the policies and interventions that will best allow the poor to escape poverty and stay out of it through growth. Growth does usually reduce poverty, certainly, but with much variation - from substantial impacts, through attenuated impacts - and there are also episodes where it does not, or where growth may be immiserising. The "big idea" embedded in this report is that most governments promote "growth from above", involving large, formal investments, while most people escape poverty through "growth from below", involving small, usually informal, investments by individuals and households, enabled or disadvantaged by their working environments. "Growth from below" is critical for most poor and vulnerable people but remains unrecorded and much harder to promote. Evidence from a growing database of country studies of poverty dynamics shows that most people sustaining their escapes from poverty do so through growth from below, even in countries where growth from above is generating jobs. This report analyses policies and programmatic approaches that directly help people out of poverty through the informal economy, women's economic empowerment and the inclusion of most marginalised groups, agriculture, the rural non-farm economy and migration.

Using a unique household panel data set for rural India covering the years 1993/1994 and 2004/2005 we test a key theoretical assertion of caste and its effects, namely that marginalised social groups fare worse in terms of income levels when resident in villages dominated by upper castes. We also test whether marginalised groups perform better or worse in villages where their own group is dominant. We proceed to explore the implications for income growth and for poverty incidence and persistence. After controlling for potential locational confounds, upper caste dominance confers a positive externality on other social groups. This externality is discounted by group specific `oppression' effects which range in size from zero to 16 percent of mean income and peak for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Other Backward Classes (OBC) households. Further, we identify positive and large own dominance (village `enclave') effects that account for as much as a quarter of mean income for SC households in the post reform years. These results are robust to how dominance is measured. We also identify pathways through which identity-based welfare disparities may be reduced; while such disparities are widening, their causes show signs of both persistence and change. Whereas education matters, land redistribution provides the key to eliminating the adverse effects of upper caste dominance. Even after factor endowment and other controls have been added, and with the notable exception of those in SC dominated villages, SCs not only perform worse than other groups but have fallen further behind during the post reform years.

経済学 / Economics, An important question in labour economics is whether the presence in a work environment of friends or relations lowers or raises productivity. We examine the question using evidence from a simple field experiment in Uttar Pradesh, India with married wives and husbands. Teams of four are engaged to dig soil under the NREGA programme. In one treatment husbands and wives work together; in the other treatment they work in separate teams. We find that working with spouses is associated with significantly higher productivity., JEL Classification Codes: C9, D1, D7, M5, O1, http://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/munro_alistair/