CPRC Research themes

Assets are vital to reducing vulnerability. Accumulating assets can improve livelihoods and gradually help people out of poverty. Those who lose assets may be pushed into poverty, and those with few assets to begin with may be caught in a poverty trap.

Research

CPRC research has shown significant evidence of the importance of asset accumulation in enabling escapes from poverty, including intergenerationally transmitted poverty. The loss of assets is a major factor associated with descent into poverty, with the strongest evidence for this relating to diverse health shocks. 

Work on asets has focused on isolated rural areas where lack of access to markets and services may create ‘low return’ poverty traps. Work in Bangladesh and in forest areas in Bolivia have looked at evidence for the existence of poverty traps in rural areas.

Key messages resulting from asssets research importantly show that having the right complementary assets, a somewhat diversified portfolio, an enabling policy and market context, and the right social, economic and political relationships are all necessary if assets are to provide a pathway out of poverty. In particular, assets need to function together with markets to enable escape from poverty. 

Resources

Assets and chronic poverty

• Assets and chronic poverty
  ^{CPRC Working paper 100}
  
• Assets: some intial results
  ^{Research summary 6}
  

Assets and poverty traps

• How strong is the evidence for the existence of poverty traps? A multi-country assessment
  ^{CPRC Working paper 180}
  
• Assets and poverty traps in rural Bangladesh
  ^{CPRC Working paper 143}
  
• Testing a poverty trap mechanism with Tsimane' panel data
  ^{CPRC Working paper 158}
  
• Isolation and poverty: the relationship between spatially differentiated access to goods and services and poverty
  ^{CPRC Working paper 162}
  

Intergenerational poverty and assets

• Intrahousehold asset dynamics and its effect on the intergenerational transmission of poverty
  ^{CPRC Working paper 115}
  
• Investments, bequeaths, and public policy: inter-generational asset transfers and the escape from poverty
  ^{CPRC Working paper 98}
  

View more resources on Assets and on Intergenerational transmission of poverty.