About Us
Nearly 800 million people, more than one tenth of humanity, live on less than $1.90 per day, with the frequent hunger, chronic health problems, and everyday indignities that such poverty entails. How can the living standards of the poor be raised? The Center for Development Economics and Policy (CDEP) supports microeconomic research to investigate the sources of poverty and to inform practical interventions to address them. We proceed from the view that we need to understand the world in order to change it: we need to understand how markets work, and so often fail to work, in developing-country settings in order to improve the outcomes that they generate for the poor. The Center supports a range of methodological approaches that share high standards of intellectual rigor and the ultimate goal of reducing poverty.
