Accounting for the Poor
Name
Accounting-for-the-Poor.pdf
Size
884.81 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f786f8c4a89d329a20b4d123f4feb0fc
Author(s)
Townsend, Robert
Date Issued
August 2013
Journal
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Citation
Townsend, Robert M. “Accounting for the Poor.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 95, no. 5 (August 12, 2013): 1196–1208.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Economists and other social scientists have long tried to understand the nature of poverty and how poor people make decisions. For example, T.W. Schultz, a Nobel Laureate, former professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and former president of the American Economic Association, spent his career working in development and agricultural economics. In his 1980 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Schultz suggests that there is some accounting for the behavior of the poor in agriculture. “Farmers, the world over, in dealing with costs, returns, and risks are calculating economic agents. Within their small, individual, allocative domain they are fine-tuning entrepreneurs, tuning so subtly that many experts fail to recognize how efficient they are” (Schultz 1980).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/ajae/aat022
