New Approaches to Old Problems: Market-Based Strategies for Poverty Alleviation

The landscape of social welfare policy and practice is marked by new approaches that use business and market mechanisms to combat poverty. This article reviews four such antipoverty strategies: microenterprise, individual development accounts, social enterprise, and bottom-of-the-pyramid (or base-of-the-pyramid) schemes. The study provides a synthesis of the empirical research on the effectiveness of these approaches to date. It examines the effect of each of the four antipoverty strategies on barriers to market inclusivity and, when possible, considers the role of the institutional environment in shaping the strategies.