For India's Rural Poor, Growing Towns Matter More than Growing Cities

By John Gibson, G. Datt, Rinku Murgai, M. Ravallion. 2017

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of India's secondary towns or big cities mattered more to recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data deficiencies have made this a difficult question to answer previously. Satellite observations of night lights are used to measure urban growth on the extensive and intensive margins in the context of a spatial Durbin fixed-effects model of poverty measures for rural India, calibrated to a panel of 59 regions observed four times over 1993-2012. The expansion of lit area had greater effect on the rural poverty measures than did intensive margin growth in the brightness of light from urban areas. For India's current stage of development, growth of secondary towns may do more to reduce rural poverty than big city growth, although the theoretical model suggests that cities may eventually take over from towns as the drivers of rural poverty reduction.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e7696140871a804a35988e721a8aaa14eba69f3

How researchers see this paper

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In Global and Planetary Change

1. Geua Boe-Gibson
2. John Gibson
3. K. Fuglie
4. S. Olivia

In Transportation

1. Geua Boe-Gibson
2. John Gibson
3. S. Olivia

Citations in the corpus

• NIGHT LIGHTS IN ECONOMICS: SOURCES AND USES1 (2020, background): “One standalone study with lights variables on the RHS that shows the threat posed by flaws in the DMSP data is Gibson et al (2017), who examine effects of urban growth on rural poverty in India; big city lights are contrasted with lights from towns, and for both the extensive margin (lit area) is…”
• Accelerating Poverty Reduction in Africa (2019, background): “Des recherches transnationales et des études de cas réalisées en Inde, au Mexique et en Tanzanie indiquent que, pour réduire la pauvreté, le développement des petites agglomérations compte plus que celui des villes (Berdegué et Soloaga 2018 ; Christiaensen, De Weerdt et Kanbur 2019 ; Christiaensen e”
• Harvesting Prosperity: Technology and Productivity Growth in Agriculture (2019, background): “82 Harvesting Prosperity The findings also point toward a rethinking of development strategy, which has traditionally concentrated on large urban centers, to give greater emphasis on the development of small towns and secondary cities, as suggested by a growing body of literature (Christiaensen and ”