Is Poverty Incompatible with Asset Accumulation?

Abstract

Abstract This article examines whether poverty is incompatible with asset accumulation. It considers whether the poor can and do save and whether they are able to build up assets over time. It presents data from household surveys, as well as from programs targeted at helping families accumulate assets. Presenting and evaluating the state of knowledge provides a new lens on whether the current income-based safety net could better serve poor families by having an asset-building component. The conventional thinking is that families that are income-poor cannot save. The article shows that this thinking is inaccurate; poverty does not have to be incompatible with asset accumulation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.