Poverty Profiles And Coping Strategies Of The Hoar Essay

The paper titled â€Å"Poverty Profiles and Coping Strategies of the Hoar (Ox-bow lake) Households in Bangladesh† provides poverty estimates using different methods for Hoar areas of Bangladesh. The paper also gives a clear overview of how poor households face the seasonal poverty incidence that is endemic to this region. The main strength of the paper is relatively large sample size covering hoar areas across different districts of north-eastern part of Bangladesh. Since author(s) has a rich data set, I was expecting that there would be many interesting findings and dynamics from the author’s analysis. However, findings on poverty estimates and coping strategies that the author obtained are less dissimilar than what we can observe in most of the rural areas in Bangladesh. In addition, there are some issues that the author needs to take care of before the paper got published. My comments are as follows: 1. The timing of the survey was not chosen in accordance with the cropping season in Bangladesh. The household level data were collected during February-May 2009 (page 5, line 2), however, in Bangladesh there are two main cropping season: Kharif which starts from May, and Rabi which starts from October and ends in February depending on the specific region of Bangladesh (Banglapedia, 2016). Thus, the survey period coincides with the lean season that may lead to overestimates of poverty profiles. The author does not provide any motivation for choosing the aforementioned time period