Photo by Geoff Bugbee
Poverty costs. The question is, how much? How much does it cost for a woman to walk a mile for water? How much does it cost to wait for the bus when you’re never sure it will even show up? How much does it cost to wait a long time for virtually all of the goods and services daily life requires?
These are the questions a group of students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs asked as they tried to determine a way to measure what development economists call the “poverty penalty,” which is basically a tax on being poor.
Read the students’ blog post on the Majority Markets blog for what will hopefully be the beginning of a provocative conversation.