Progress on the United Nations goals is often assessed using the widely known ‘headcount ratio’. This column argues that such an intuitive and popular measure is insufficient since different regions might face different realities in terms of deprivations within each indicator. This is demonstrated, for example, in the case of sanitation deprivation by the contrasting
Microfinance is often heralded as a panacea for poverty in developing countries, but in order to design more effective and more equitable products, it is essential to understand what demand they are actually satisfying. This column reports evidence that the distinction between microlending and microsaving is largely illusory: a natural experiment with poor households in
