Pathways Out of Poverty: Private Firms and Economic Mobility in Developing Countries

Until recently, development economists tended to assume a role for private enterprise in reducing poverty, but they didn't articulate it explicitly. The new institutional economics literature, with its emphasis on transaction costs, addresses the environment in which private businesses operate in various countries - the "investment climate".

Building on this new thinking, Pathways Out of Poverty begins by citing the worldwide drop in the number of very poor people and goes on to identify t...