Rural Poverty

By Stefan Dercon. 2009

228 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Poverty is still a predominantly rural phenomenon. However, the context of rural poverty has been changing across the world, with high growth in some economies and stagnation in others. Furthermore, increased openness in many economies has affected the specific role of agricultural growth for rural poverty reduction. This paper revisits an old question : how does growth and poverty reduction come about if most of the poor live in rural areas and are dependent on agriculture? What is the role of agricultural and rural development in this respect? focusing on Sub Saharan Africa, and using economic theory and the available evidence, the author comes to the conclusion that changing contexts has meant that agricultural growth is only crucial as an engine for growth in particular settings, more specifically in landlocked, resource poor countries, which are often also characterized by relatively low potential for agriculture. However, extensive market failures in key factor markets and likely spatial effects give a remaining crucial role for rural development policies, including focusing on agriculture, to assist the inclusion of the rural poor in growth and development. How to overcome these market failures remains a key issue for further research.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83198a991776b89ac21ae28c0acea29c84118b05

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Citations in the corpus

Agriculture and Development: A Brief Review of the Literature (2011, unknown): “Dercon (2009) derives this conclusion from a two-sector model elaborated by Eswaran and Kotwal (1993).”
Gender and Rural Non-Farm Entrepreneurship (2012, background): “Moreover, the sector appears to be growing (Lanjouw and Lanjouw, 2001) and rural off-farm diversification is widely considered a potentially promising poverty alleviation strategy as the vast majority of poor people continue to live in rural areas (Dercon, 2009, Chen and Ravallion, 2010).”
Is Green Growth Good for the Poor? (2014, background): “lead to a perpetuation of poverty to avoid risk (Dercon, 2009).”
On the Structural Transformation of Rural Africa (2017, background): “With full integration, food imports can in principle enable an economy to skip some of the above stages by redirecting labor directly from agriculture into industry, relying on manufactured export earnings to finance food imports (Dercon 2009, Dercon and Gollin 2014).”
Sustainable energy in Africa: A comprehensive data and policies review (2014, background): “While it is not correct to claim rapid urbanization of Africa, and instead the urban growth rates in most Africa countries generally follow the national population trends [112], it is undoubtedly true that underdevelopment and poverty are predominantly rural phenomena [103,113]: indeed about 70% of ”
The (Evolving) Role of Agriculture in Poverty Reduction: An Empirical Perspective (2011, background): “…maintain that the classical intersectoral linkages no longer apply with the same force, 2 given increasingly interconnected markets, and that a pro-agriculture strategy will often not deliver the overall growth necessary for rapid poverty reduction, especially in Africa (Ellis 2005; Dercon 2009).”
Beyond Agriculture Versus Non-Agriculture: Decomposing Sectoral Growth–Poverty Linkages in Five African Countries (2016, background): “…that is, agriculture versus nonagriculture, still underpins much of the debate over which sources of economic growth are most important for poverty reduction in African countries south of the Sahara (SSA) (see, for example, Dercon 2009; Diao, Hazell, and Thurlow 2010; Collier and Dercon 2014).”
Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead (2012, background): “Drought- and pestresistant varieties, such as submergencetolerant rice and drought-tolerant maize, provide options that reduce farmers’ risk and improve incentives to invest in productivity-enhancing technologies (68).”
Addressing poverty and inequality in the rural economy from a global perspective (2015, background): “Yet, even allowing for the progress that is being made in terms of poverty, the persistence of high levels of rural poverty and uneven progress in several parts of the world, notably Sub-Saharan Africa, ought to keep rural development high on the international development agenda (Dercon, 2009).”