Imagine that a baguette costs 1 USD. Three months later, you go to the same shop to buy the exact same baguette and the person at the counter asks for 1.85 USD. Suddenly, you can’t afford a baguette. Even if you could, that is the money you had budgeted for other primary needs. Far from being fiction, this happened in Haiti, where the price of grain increased up to 85 percent in 2008. The food crisis led to violent protests, as people couldn’t afford to eat, and eventually concluded with the ousting of the prime minister.
Price shocks affect food security in many poor re...
There is an ongoing debate on how to provide sufficient opportunities for individuals to escape the woes of poverty. Small and medium enterprises are one way to do that. However, capital is required and traditional means of obtaining it are inaccessible. This is where Microfinance Institutions (MFI) come in and provide microcredit, even if no collateral is present. Despite this availability and accessibility, in Bangladesh take-up is unexpectedly low. This issue is well-known in the literature, as is the fact that microcredit might lack the long-lasting social impact economists foresaw.
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On May 15th, Pepita Miquel-Florensa, Assistant Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics and Research Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study in Tolouse, presented her paper "Voting Corrupt Politicians Out of Office: Evidence from an Experiment in Paraguay". This question is specially relevant while analyzing the way in which democratic institutions work in Latin American countries, where corruption is usually very common and frequently accepted by the population.
Paraguay is ranked 123 out of 176 in the corruption perception index, and this is demonstrated by sev...