Fighting Poverty, between market and gift

Aid or trade: that is often the alternative considered in the fight to relieve poverty. The debate also regularly swings between market solutions and publicly- or privately-funded aid mechanisms. In reality, this alternative is over-simplistic. The daily reality for the world’s poor seems to consist primarily of a tangle of aid-based and market-based relationships, and the survival strategies deployed by poor communities take no account of this distinction. At the same time, and as if mirrori...