Abhijit Banerjee, Economist

His revelations on poverty and its relief stand out. Unlike the debate's two big rival camps—one that insists that aid alone is the answer to poverty and the other which believes such measures result in a dependence trap—Banerjee, MIT professor and co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, establishes through data-crunching that carefully designed welfare schemes alone bear fruit. Which means such programmes will have no impact if implemented without taking socio-economic-political factors into account.

The Kolkata-born economist and co-author of Poor Economics has spent a lot of time studying poverty alleviation in India. He advocates cutting back pointless subsidies and radically rethinking ways to fight poverty. Countries like India, he argues, need to focus more on the ravages of urban deprivation.

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