New Evidence on the Urbanization of Global Poverty
The authors provide new evidence on the extent to which absolute poverty has urbanized in the developing world, and the role that population urbanization has played in overall poverty reduction. They find that one-quarter of the world's consum...
Main Authors: | , , |
---|---|
Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
Language: | English |
Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
|
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2007/04/8178686/new-evidence-urbanization-global-poverty http://hdl.handle.net/10986/7277 |
Summary: | The authors provide new evidence on the
extent to which absolute poverty has urbanized in the
developing world, and the role that population urbanization
has played in overall poverty reduction. They find that
one-quarter of the world's consumption poor live in
urban areas and that the proportion has been rising over
time. By fostering economic growth, urbanization helped
reduce absolute poverty in the aggregate but did little for
urban poverty. Over 1993-2002, the count of the "$1 a
day" poor fell by 150 million in rural areas but rose
by 50 million in urban areas. The poor have been urbanizing
even more rapidly than the population as a whole. Looking
forward, the recent pace of urbanization and current
forecasts for urban population growth imply that a majority
of the poor will still live in rural areas for many decades
to come. There are marked regional differences: Latin
America has the most urbanized poverty problem, East Asia
has the least; there has been a "ruralization" of
poverty in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; in marked
contrast to other regions, Africa's urbanization
process has not been associated with falling overall poverty. |
---|