Journal Special Issue
Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics

This Special Issue brings together papers from UNU-WIDER Conference on Poverty and Behavioural Economics that were accepted after the peer review process of the journal. The eight papers in this Special Issue all share the objective of exploring the consequences for the analysis of poverty and development of broadening the perspective on economic behavior beyond the standard textbook model of rational choice.

In the limited space available, the coverage of topics cannot of course be as broad as it was at the conference itself, but some of the central issues are indeed broached in the papers in this Special Issue. The papers cover inter alia the topics of behavioral design, savings, social networks, contracts, cooperation, and inequality and poverty.

The papers in this Special Issue illustrate the contribution that behavioral economics can make to the study of poverty and development. We hope that the Special Issue as a whole highlights this as a vibrant topic of investigation and policy focus, and that it will serve to encourage further work in this important area of research.