Bryan Caplan recomienda la lectura de Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day
1. The income of the ultra-poor is not only low, but highly variable. They rarely have regular jobs in a "sweatshop." Instead, they desperately cobble together income from many different sources. Many days they earn nothing at all.
2. No one, no matter how poor, lives "hand to mouth." Even the poorest people save money, make investments, and plan ahead.
3. The poor also borrow a lot of money. Who would lend to them? For the most part, other poor people - family, savings clubs, small-time loan-sharks. The rates are astronomical - 20% per month is pretty common.
4. Even the poorest people spend a lot of money on things other than food. One of their main reasons for saving and borrowing is to pay for relatively lavish weddings and funerals.
También cita varios párrafos interesantes. Entre ellos, este ejemplo de una estrategia de las multinacionales para poder servir también a los hogares más pobres:
Seeing the poor could not afford many of their existing products, multinationals like Proctor and Gamble and Unilever found a solution by selling single-serve packets of shampoo to poor households in India. The single-serve packages, costing a few cents each, turned out to be a popular option for people lacking the daily cash flow to easily purchase large bottles of shampoo, regular-sized tins of tea, 200-count bottles of aspirin, and the like.
O este otro sobre por qué los pobres pagan intereses astronómicos por los créditos:
Finance for the poor means dealing with a lot of small loans and, when savings services are on offer, many small deposits. For providers, small-sized transactions mean limited scale economies and thus high costs per transaction. Out of necessity, "pro-poor" microfinance institutions tend to charge the highest rates of all; microfinance banks serving better-off consumers tend to charge the least. Even if Compartamos [a Mexican bank for the poor] had earned no profit and paid no taxes, their interest rates would have still had to be 60 percent per year to cover costs of their strategy for small-scale lending in Mexican villages and towns.
