Episode 18: Portfolios of the Poor

Portfolios of the Poor Book CoverDaryl Colliins and Jonathan Morduch discuss their book, co-authored with Stuart Rutherford and Orland Ruthven, Portfolios of the Poor.

Forty percent of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day. You may be surprised by the extent to which they use financial services.  Daryl and Jonathan describe their work and their findings.

Running time 62 minutes; size 25.4 Mb.

Download transcript (pdf)

3 thoughts on “Episode 18: Portfolios of the Poor

  1. I really enjoyed listening (on the treadmill in the gym with the iPod) to this extraordinarily informative and instructive interview. It was refreshing to get so many insights into the way the poorest of the poor in Asia and Africa actually manage their precarious, exiguous, uneven and unpredictable finances: the facts and figures seemed so remote from the speculative pronouncements of some (no, of course not you) academic development gurus. A most valuable corrective to ill-informed guesswork. Many thanks to you, Daryl Collins and Jonathan Morduch (however did Murdoch get transmogrified into Morduch, by the way?)
    Brian
    http://www.barder.com/ephems/


  2. Dear Colleagues

    There is another question worth asking … not so much how do the BoP live on under $2 a day, but how people in “rich” countries are so poor on $100 a day? My answer to this question is that the metrics being used make almost no sense at all … an accounting and academic disgrace!

    Peter Burgess
    Tr-Ac-Net Community Analytics!


  3. New to the podcast, but was interested in the contents – even though I found it pretty academic and hard to follow at times. I guess it should come as no real surprise that those who survive on low incomes are pretty resilient and have survival strategies. The next question is then what it takes to lift people from this wealth bracket and the difference it would make to them.


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