The need to address extreme poverty from the perspective of marginality arises from the frustration that the number of the poorest and hungry remains unacceptably high. This triggered the call for an innovative approach from the side of science and action. The conceptual and analytical framework...

Extreme poverty is an immense political and market failure, wasting the potential of hundreds of millions of people. Investing in the creation of markets that include the extreme poor and marginalized should thus not only be considered as a charitable activity, but promises high returns on...

A migration network is modeled as a mutually beneficial cooperative agreement between financially-constrained individuals who seek to finance and expedite their migration. The cooperation agreement creates a network: “established” migrants contract to support the subsequent migration of...

Strong ties with the home country and with the host country can coexist. An altruistic migrant who sends remittances to his family back home assimilates more the more altruistic he is, and also more than a non-remitting migrant.

This paper studies the growth dynamics of a developing country under migration. Assuming that human capital formation is subject to a strong enough, positive intertemporal externality, the prospect of migration will increase growth in the home country in the long run. If the external effect is...

In the model of Stark et al. (1997, 1998), the possibility of employment in a developed country raises the level of human capital acquired by workers in the developing country. We show that this result holds even when workers have the option to save.

This paper considers the integration of economies as a merger of populations. The premise is that the merger of groups of people alters their social landscape and their comparators. The paper identifies the effect of the merger on aggregate distress. A merger is shown to increase aggregate...

Traditional Knowledge (TK) systems have always been integral to the survival and adaptation of human societies. Yet, they enjoy a fairly recent recognition and popularization by scientists, the media, politicians, corporates and the wider public. In this paper we present a typology of key...

This paper asks whether population growth is conducive to the sustainability of cooperation. A simple model is developed in which farmers who live around a circular lake engage in trade with their adjacent neighbors. The payoffs from this activity are governed by a prisoner’s dilemma “rule...

Over the last decade, commodity prices have registered substantial booms and busts marked by extreme volatility. Wheat in particular, one of the main non-oil commodities, has registered a roller-coaster in price levels which seems to be inconsistent with supply and demand fundamentals. To...