Do Poverty Traps Exist?

Kraay, Aart ; McKenzie, David

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ABSOLUTE VALUE;    AGGREGATE LEVEL;    AGRICULTURE;    AMOUNT OF CAPITAL;    ANNUAL GROWTH;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6835
RP-ID  :  WPS6835

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper reviews the empiricalevidence on the existence of poverty traps, understood asself-reinforcing mechanisms through which poor individualsor countries remain poor. Poverty traps have captured theinterest of many development policy makers, because povertytraps provide a theoretically coherent explanation forpersistent poverty. They also suggest that temporary policyinterventions may have long-term effects on poverty.However, a review of the reduced-form empirical evidencesuggests that truly stagnant incomes of the sort predictedby standard models of poverty traps are in fact quite rare.Moreover, the empirical evidence regarding several canonicalmechanisms underlying models of poverty traps is mixed.