To what extent are Bangladesh's recent gains in poverty reduction different from the past?

The poor in Bangladesh are more likely to belong to households with a larger number of dependents and lower education among household members, be engaged in daily wage labor, own little land, and be less likely to receive remittances. This poverty profile for 2005 is similar to the profile in the mid-1980s and hence at first glance it would appear that little has changed over time. A closer look at national household survey data suggests a more nuanced story. This paper uses the latest two rounds of the Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey to decompose the micro-determinants of poverty reduction between 2000 and 2005, closely following a similar analysis using five earlier rounds of the Survey. The comparison of results shows that the spatial distribution of poverty seen in earlier decades has changed with time and the drivers of poverty reduction are different in several respects.Rural Poverty Reduction,Regional Economic Development,Access to Finance,Small Area Estimation Poverty Mapping

Home-Based Work Decisions among Bangladeshi Women

Between 2003 and 2015, the labor force participation rate of women in Bangladesh increased from 26.0% to 35.6%. On further analysis, we find that much of this gain was due to an increasing number of women working from home. We use the model proposed by Edwards and Field-Hendrey (2002) to study the supply-side factors that affect the location-of-work decision of Bangladeshi women. Afterward, we use a simplified version of the decomposition technique devised by Bourguignon, Ferreira, and Leite (2008) to see which factors are driving women to work from home. Our analysis shows that the rising wealth of Bangladeshi households is associated with the rising number of women choosing to work from home. This trend is prevalent among urban and rural women, and among women in different age groups. We also find that married young women are more likely to work from home