Land degradation is a global problem that particularly impacts the poor rural inhabitants of low and middle-income countries. We improve upon existing literature by estimating the extent of rural populations in 2000 and 2010 globally on degrading and improving agricultural land, taking into account the role of market access, and analyzing the resulting impacts on poverty. Using a variety of spa...

In vast markets of developing economies, especially in South Asia, both seasonal rural migrants and threatened urban workers constitute a bulk of the new class of working poor and are truly marginal in terms of their socio-economic status. We argue that gift-giving and gift exchanges in labour markets can perpetuate both rural and urban poverty among the working poor. In the context of working ...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to two-thirds of the world’s ultra-poor today. This paper offers current thinking on the structural causes of the spatially concentrated, persistent ultrapoverty that has plagued Africa for a generation and some key entry points for facilitating Africans’ escape from persistent ultra-poverty. The increased recognition of persistent ultra-poverty has rekindled lo...

Rural development has not received the priority and attention warranted by the present and future concentration of poverty in rural areas. Is this perhaps because rural development agencies present conflicting narratives? A framework is presented within which to answer that question, and is then applied to the recent policy statements of the EU, FAO, IFAD and the World Bank. Each policy stateme...

In this paper we provide an analytical account of the mechanisms through which globalization, in the sense of increased foreign trade and long-term capital flows, affects the lives of the rural poor in developing countries (in their capacity as workers, consumers, recipients of public services or users of common property resources). Globalization can cause many hardships for the rural poor, but...

Do poor elders really leave poverty? We explore the prevalence and nature of exits from poverty among poor elders, with special attention to rural-urban differences in this regard. Analyzing twenty years of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that 40% of poor elders leave poverty after one year. However, descriptive data suggest many of these exits resulted from small increase...

This paper analyzes the evolution of poverty in China from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, employing a version of Shapley decomposition tailored to unit-record household survey data. The changes in poverty trends are attributed to two proximate causes— income growth and shifts in income distribution. Different datasets, poverty lines, poverty measures, and equivalence scales are used to exami...