According to the World Bank, poverty is a major cause of ill-health and limits access to health care and adequate nutrition. “Ill-health, in turn, is a major cause of poverty. This is partly due to the costs of seeking health care, which include out-of-pocket spending on care, transportation costs and informal payments to providers,” the bank noted.
Results of the research, published May in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, suggest that people who are extremely poor usually face a “poverty trap” where the initial lack of resources stops them from improving their circumstances.
However, the transfer of an asset such as a cow may be enough for some households to transform domestic servants or labourers into farmers and small livestock businessmen, and engage in a profitable activity such as rearing livestock that brings in far more income, indicated the study that involved 23,000 households in 1,309 villages.
source : OWSA