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Contemplating Scarcity: Grameen Foundation’s Alex Counts on how the phenomenon of scarcity impacts microfinance and poverty alleviation
Alex Counts, president and CEO of Grameen Foundation, discusses new research on the phenomenon of scarcity – how having too little of anything important to the human experience can impact policy and practice in microfinance and poverty alleviation.
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- Education
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Playing the Odds on Saving
Americans’ lack of savings has become a crisis. Our confidence that we’ve got enough saved for retirement is at historically low levels, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey. More than a quarter of Americans have saved less than $1,000 for retirement. Only half of those surveyed say they could definitely find $2,000 if an emergency arose in the next month.
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Most effective way to reduce smoking? Increase price of cigarettes, study says
That is the conclusion of a new study that calls for a tripling of tobacco taxes and a doubling of the price of a pack of cigarettes in much of the world.
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- Education, Health Care
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Success at Scale: How CARD Bank activated 480,000 poor savers in the Philippines
Grameen Foundation recently completed an innovative 4-year project with CARD Bank in the Philippines. Their goal: to provide access to secure, accessible and convenient savings accounts targeted to the poor. Julie Peachey describes how Grameen helped the bank open 480,000 new active savings accounts and create the infrastructure for implementation of mobile financial services, while helping its partner ensure sustainability.
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- Uncategorized
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Give People Choices, Not Edicts
Over the past few years, many nations have adopted policies that promise to improve people’s lives while preserving their freedom of choice. These approaches, informed by behavioral economics, are sometimes called nudges.
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People-Centered Finance: How behavioral economics can improve financial products – part 2 of our Q&A with Alexandra Fiorillo, VP at ideas42
Why do people struggle to make sound financial decisions? Answering that question is one of the missions of ideas42, a consulting organization that specializes in behavioral economics, the study of how market decisions are made. We spoke with Alexandra Fiorillo, a vice president at ideas42, about how behavioral economics can improve financial product design.
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The Power of Choices: Applying behavioral economics to financial services – part 1 of our interview with Alexandra Fiorillo, VP at ideas42
If you’re working to alleviate poverty, steering people toward wise financial choices can make a huge difference. That’s why we’re excited to introduce ideas42, a consulting organization that specializes in behavioral economics, as a content partner on NextBillion Financial Innovation. We spoke with their VP Alexandra Fiorillo about how behavioral economics can be used to promote financial inclusion and improve lives at the BoP.
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- Finance
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What Exactly Does ‘Better Banked’ Mean?: PopTech event explores fundamental questions around financial inclusion
What would happen if behavioral economists, implementing partners and policymakers got together to think about financial security - along with ethnographers, product designers and entrepreneurs? A recent PopTech salon offered the opportunity, raising fundamental questions of consumer behavior and what financial security means in today’s world.
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