Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries

This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty line. Th...

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Main Authors:	Ferre, Celine, Ferreira, Francisco H.G., Lanjouw, Peter
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	en_US
Published:	Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank 2014
Subjects:	consumption expenditures extreme poverty farmers food consumers global poverty incidence of poverty income inequality poor poverty line poverty rates poverty reduction strategies rural rural areas rural phenomenon rural population rural poverty rural poverty reduction sanitation unemployment
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19076

id	okr-10986-19076
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-190762021-04-23T14:03:51Z Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries Ferre, Celine Ferreira, Francisco H.G. Lanjouw, Peter consumption expenditures extreme poverty farmers food consumers global poverty incidence of poverty income inequality poor poverty line poverty rates poverty reduction strategies rural rural areas rural phenomenon rural population rural poverty rural poverty reduction sanitation unemployment This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage and solid waste disposal. We illustrate for one country – Morocco – that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper hinge on a specific definition of “urban area”; are driven by differences in the cost of living across city-size categories; by reliance on an income-based concept of well-being; or by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level. 2014-07-30T15:08:09Z 2014-07-30T15:08:09Z 2012-11 Journal Article World Bank Economic Review 1564-698X 10.1093/wber/lhs007 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19076 en_US CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank Morocco
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
language	en_US
topic	consumption expenditures extreme poverty farmers food consumers global poverty incidence of poverty income inequality poor poverty line poverty rates poverty reduction strategies rural rural areas rural phenomenon rural population rural poverty rural poverty reduction sanitation unemployment
spellingShingle	consumption expenditures extreme poverty farmers food consumers global poverty incidence of poverty income inequality poor poverty line poverty rates poverty reduction strategies rural rural areas rural phenomenon rural population rural poverty rural poverty reduction sanitation unemployment Ferre, Celine Ferreira, Francisco H.G. Lanjouw, Peter Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries
geographic_facet	Morocco
description	This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage and solid waste disposal. We illustrate for one country – Morocco – that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper hinge on a specific definition of “urban area”; are driven by differences in the cost of living across city-size categories; by reliance on an income-based concept of well-being; or by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level.
format	Journal Article
author	Ferre, Celine Ferreira, Francisco H.G. Lanjouw, Peter
author_facet	Ferre, Celine Ferreira, Francisco H.G. Lanjouw, Peter
author_sort	Ferre, Celine
title	Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries
title_short	Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries
title_full	Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries
title_fullStr	Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries
title_full_unstemmed	Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries
title_sort	is there a metropolitan bias? the relationship between poverty and city size in a selection of developing countries
publisher	Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
publishDate	2014
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19076
_version_	1764443517443112960

Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries

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