Adverse shocks and social protection in Africa: what role for formal and informal financial institutions?
Abena D. Oduro (2010)
Evidence on the wide range of adverse shocks experienced by households in Africa, reveal that the coping mechanisms adopted by most households comprise mainly of self insurance and help from family and other networks, with little access to formal financial institutions, thereby suggesting that public interventions are required to help households deal with the adverse shocks effectively as well as reducing the incidence of such shocks.

African Poverty is Falling… Much Faster Than You Think!
Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy (2010)
This paper impressively documents trends in poverty and inequality in Africa, where outcomes are more positive than many scholars and organizations claim.

Agricultural Growth and Investment Options for Poverty Reduction in Nigeria
Xinshen Diao, Manson Nwafor, Vida Alpuerto, Kamiljon Akramov, and Sheu Salau (2010)
This study examines the optimal agricultural development strategy in Nigeria, focusing on subsectors, spillovers, and state and national public policy targeting.

Asset-based measurement of poverty
Andrea Brandolini, Silvia Magri and Timothy M. Smeeding (2010)
The paper evaluates the measures of poverty that rely on indicators of household net worth. Two approaches are followed in the literature: income net worth measures and asset-poverty.

Asset dynamics in Northern Nigeria
Andrew Dillon and Esteban J. Quinones (2010)
The study examines household asset dynamics and the asset inequality between genders in Northern Nigeria over the period 1988-2008. The authors state that price fluctuations reinforced gender asset inequality within households.

Barriers to household risk management – evidence from India
Shawn Cole, Xavier Gine, Jeremy Tobacman, Petia Topalova, Robert Townsend and James Vickey (2010)
The paper examines a financial contract designed to insure rural Indian households against an exogenous income risk: rainfall variation during the monsoon season

Building Sustainable Small-Scale Agriculture in Southern Africa
International Finance Corporation (2010)
This report summarizes a recent conference that brought together representatives from agriculture, development organizations, and financial institutions to identify ways to improve productivity in African agriculture.

Cash on delivery: A new approach to foreign aid
Nancy Birdsall, Ayah Mahgoub, and William D. Savedoff (2010)
This article examines the new foreign aid movement of cash on delivery.

Challenges in Banking the Rural Poor: Evidence from Kenya's Western Province
Pascaline Dupas, Sarah Green, Anthony Keats, and Jonathan Robinson (2011)
This randomized evaluation of access to financial services in Kenya highlights that demand as well as supply factors are important determinants of service uptake.

China in Africa: A macroeconomic perspective
Benedicte Vibe Christensen (2010)
This article examines the Sino-African economic relationship, and how China might better administer its financing to promote sustainable African growth.

Crop price indemnified loans for farmers: A pilot experiment in rural Ghana
Karlan, Dean, Ed Kutsoati, Margaret McMillan, and Chris Udry (2010)
An experiment in Ghana examines how risk mitigation impacts credit and investment decisions, finding that although indemnified loans did not change borrowing behaviour, farmers are more willing to bear the risk of bringing goods to market rather than accept lower prices at farm gate.

Does Female Empowerment Promote Economic Development?
Matthias Doepke and Michèle Tertilt (2010)
This study suggests that though transfer payments to women often increase household spending on children, they may have unintended consequences in some contexts.

Does microfinance reduce poverty in Bangladesh? new evidence from household panel data
Imai, Katsushi S., and Md. Shafiul Azam. (2010)
An empirical analysis of microfinance in rural Bangladesh finds a positive impact on poverty reduction only for households who use the loans for productive purposes, suggesting that microfinance lenders should to monitor loan usage in order to meet poverty reduction goals.

Doing Our Part in Africa: Innovative IFC Solutions Expanding Access to Finance
International Finance Corporation (2011)
This report illustrates some effective ways to expand financing to small and medium sized enterprises in Africa.

Effects of credit constraints on productivity and rural household income in China
Dong, Fengxia, Jing Lu, and Allen M. Featherstone (2010)
A study of credit constraints in rural China finds agricultural productivity and household income to improve by 31.6% and 23.2%, respectively, when constraints are lifted, suggesting that factors of production are underutilized when constraints remain.

Finding missing markets (and a disturbing epilogue): evidence from an export crop adoption and marketing intervention in Kenya
Nava Ashraf, Xavier Giné, and Dean Karlan (2009)
This study examines a program that successfully assisted Kenyan smallholder farmers to export their crops, and then describes in an epilogue how the program collapsed and the farmers defaulted on their loans because their products did not satisfy European export requirements. The authors suggest that the risk of such events is one reason why seemingly profitable export strategies are not more frequently adopted

Identification strategy: a field experiment on dynamic incentives in rural credit markets
Giné, Xavier, Jessica Goldberg, and Dean Yang (2010)
A randomized control evaluation in Malawi finds that using a fingerprint technology to identify customers will increase repayment rates and cause low-quality lenders to decrease loan size, suggesting that reducing information asymmetry will increase incentive to repay loans.

Microinsurance, Trust and Economic Development: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Field Experiment
Hongbin Cai, Yuyu Chen, Hanming Fang, and Li-An Zhou (2009)
In the first study of a randomized microinsurance program, Cai et al. find that microinsurance provision significantly increased the number of sows raised by rural farmers in southwest China, and contend that though currently understudied, microinsurance may be as important a tool as microfinance in poverty alleviation.

Micro-loans, Insecticide-Treated Bednets and Malaria: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Orissa (India)
Alessandro Tarozzi, Aprajit Mahajan, Brian Blackburn, Dan Kopf, Lakshmi Krishnan, and Joanne Yoong (2011)
In this paper, the authors use a randomized controlled trial to examine the impact on malaria reduction of free bednet provision versus microfinancing services to help households purchase full cost bednets. They find that free provision substantially increases bednet usage compared to microfinancing. They suggest that microfinancing is a possible policy tool where free provision is impossible, but caution that bednets may be ineffective unless provided on a large scale.

More than Money: Impact Investing for Development
John Simon and Julia Barmeier (2010)
This article reviews the achievements, prospects, and obstacles in the emerging impact investing sector.

Pulling Agricultural Innovation and the Market Together
Elliott, Kimberly Ann (2010)
This article examines the potential for using advance market commitments and proportional prizes to stimulate agricultural innovation in developing countries.

Remittances, schooling, and child labor in Mexico
Carlo Alcaraz, Daniel Chiquiar, Salcedo (2010)
This study examines the relationship between remittances and school attendance and child labor in Mexico and finds that decreased remittances during the 2008-2009 recession led to decreased school attendance and increased child labor.

Repayment incentives and the distribution of gains from group lending
Jean Marie Baland, Rohini Somanathan and Zaki Wahhaj (2011)
The paper seeks to examine the impact of microfinance lending comprising of individual contracts to the very poor. The authors attempt to understand these patterns using a model where there is a single investment project and access to credit is limited by weak repayment incentives. The paper aims to show that in the absence of large social sanctions, the poorest borrowers are offered individual and not group contracts.

Rebuilding Business and Investment in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone
Investment Climate Advisory Services (2011)
This report reviews how the World Bank’s Removing Administrative Barriers to Investment program significantly contributed to improving the business and investment climate in post-conflict Sierra Leone, and concludes with recommendations for improving business climates in other developing countries.

R&D Investment in National and International Agricultural Research: An Ex-Ante Analysis of Productivity and Poverty Impact
Pratt, Alejandro Nin, and Shenggen Fan (2010)
This study estimates the allocation of agricultural R&D investment necessary to maximize productivity growth and poverty reduction in developing countries.

Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya
Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson (2009)
A field experiment in rural Kenya finds that savings accounts substantially increased business investment and daily expenditure among self-employed women, suggesting that there is a demand for formal savings methods in rural areas beyond the informal rotating savings and credit associations and household methods already available.

Smallholder agriculture in East Africa: trends, constraints and opportunities
Adeleke Salami, Abdul B. Kamara and Zuzana Brixiova (2010)
This paper investigates trends and opportunities in smallholder farming in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Sudan Debt Dynamics: Status Quo, Southern Secession, Debt Division, and Oil - A Financial Framework for the Future
Benjamin Leo (2010)
Leo examines how Sudan’s external debt might be dealt with, both in status quo and southern secession scenarios.

The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation
June, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan (2010)
This randomized evaluation brings new data to bear in the debate concerning the effectiveness of microfinance.

The impact of microcredit on the poor in Bangladesh: revisiting the evidence center for clobal development
David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2009)
This paper attempts to resolve conflicting findings about the impact of microcredit programs. The authors replicate three leading microfinance studies and find that the evidence for microcredit reducing poverty and smoothing consumption, especially when targeted towards women and the extremely poor, is weaker than generally assumed.

The long term consequences of famine on survivors: evidence from a unique natural experiment using China's great famine
Meng, Xin and Nancy Qian (2009)
An empirically strong study of China’s 1959-1961 Great Famine finds that children who survived the disaster suffered in weight, height, educational attainment, and labor supply thirty years later.

The shape of temptation: implications for the economic lives of the poor bureau for research and economic analysis of development
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan (2010)
This paper constructs a model of temptation goods, showing that spending on them is more consequential for the poor than for the rich, and with this model explains many of the anomalies observed in the spending patterns of the poor.

Unleashing Rural India's Economic Potential—The Role of ICT
Archana G. Gulati (2009)
This article explores how ICT might promote rural empowerment in India.

Were the Nigerian Banking Reforms of 2005 a Success... And for the Poor?
Cook, Lisa D. (2011). NBER Working Paper 16890, March
The Nigerian banking reforms of 2005 tried to improve safety, soundness, and accessibility. This paper finds that the reforms improved banks' financial soundness but did not improve bank profitability or increase access for the poor.

When is Capital Enough to Get Female Microenterprises Growing? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Ghana
Marcel Fafchamps, David McKenzie, Simon Quinn, and Christopher Woodruff (2011)
In contrast to the results of three recent randomized controlled trials conducted in Asia, this randomized controlled trial finds that grants benefit male enterprise owners more than female enterprise owners, and wealthier female enterprise owners tend to benefit more than poor female enterprise owners.