OVERVIEW This issue of Perspectives presents a selection of papers presented at the Culture, Governance, and Rural Poverty in the Midwest conference, cosponsored by the RUPRI Rural Poverty Research Center and the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development. The papers reported here cover the topics of hunger, workforce development, the economy and less educated workers, and the work-wel...

BACKGROUND Millennium Development Goal 1 encourages local initiatives for the eradication of extreme poverty. However, monitoring is indispensable to insure that actions performed at higher policy levels attain success. Poverty in rural areas in low- and middle-income countries remains chronic. Nevertheless, a rural area (Cuatro Santos) in northern Nicaragua has made substantial progress toward...

Poverty is increasingly being understood as a multidimensional phenomenon. Other than income-consumption, which has been extensively studied in the past, health, education, shelter, and social involvement are among the most important dimensions of poverty. The present study attempts to develop a simple tool to measure poverty in its multidimensionality where it views poverty as an inadequate fu...

Composite indices have been prominently used in poverty research. However, validity of these indices remains subject to debate. This paper examines the validity of a common type of composite poverty indices using data from a cross-sectional survey of 2477 households in urban and rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Multiple-group comparisons in structural equation modelling were employed for test...

This paper examines time series evidence on rural poverty over the past two decades. The time series shows that the incidence of poverty fluctuates in response to variations in real agricultural output per head, but there is no significant time trend. There is a statistically significant inverse relationship between rural poverty and agriculture performance for India as a whole, suggesting that...

Most of the population of Nigeria is rural and agriculture is the mainstay of the impoverished people’s livelihood. This paper estimated the determinants of rural poverty in Nigeria using the Tobit regression model. Through the multistage sampling technique, primary data were obtained from 150 rural farming households using a questionnaire. The Result of Tobit regression analysis shows that inc...

This paper examines the relationship between growth and poverty in Iran during the first five-year plan. In other words, effort has been made to show whether economic growth in Iran helped poor people or not. For this purpose the concept of pro poor growth has been analyzed with application to the economy of Iran, both in urban and rural areas and in the country as a whole. We use an indicator ...

This paper analyses the rural food sector of the Indian Republic in an intertemporal growth context. A model is developed which includes the government's conflict between its poverty reducing attempts through public distribution of food, subsidized issue and support food prices and long term developmental goals. The ARDL cointegration procedure for mixed order dynamic processes identifies the m...

Growth and development aid have proved to be insu cient for alleviating rural poverty in Africa. Thus, e orts should be directed toward enhancing the capacities of rural households to utilize their productive assets, human capital, and land more e ciently in order to alleviate poverty on their own. This paper uses panel and crosssectional regressions, with socio-economic and demographic survey ...