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Rural Poverty in Developing Countries Mahmood Hasan Khan How does rural poverty develop, what accounts for its persistence, and what specific measures can be taken to eliminate or mitigate it? About one-fifth of the world's population is afflicted by poverty. Poverty is not only a state of existence but also a process with many dimensions and complexities. Usually it is characterized by deprivation, vulnerability (high risk and low capacity to cope), and powerlessness (Lipton and Ravallion, 1995; Sen, 1999). These characteristics impair people's sense of well-being. Poverty can be chronic or transient, but transient poverty, if acute, can trap succeeding generations. The poor adopt all kinds of strategies to mitigate and cope with their poverty. To understand poverty, it is essential to examine the economic and social context, including institutions of the state, markets, communities, and households (families). Poverty differences cut across gender, ethnicity, age, residence (rural versus urban), and income source. In households, children and women often suffer more than men. In the community, minority ethnic or religious groups suffer more than majority groups, and the rural poor, more than the urban poor; among the rural poor, landless wage workers suffer more than small landowners or tenants. These differences among the poor reflect highly complex interactions of cultures, markets, and public policies. The links among poverty, economic growth, and income distribution have been studied quite extensively in recent literature on economic development. Absolute poverty can be alleviated if at least two conditions are met. First, economic growth must occur—or mean income must rise—on a sustained basis. Second, economic growth must be neutral with respect to income distribution or reduce income inequality. Generally, poverty cannot be reduced if economic growth does not occur. In fact, the persistent poverty of a substantial portion of the population can dampen the prospects for economic growth (Ravallion and Datt, 1999). Also, the initial distribution of income (and wealth) can greatly affect the prospects for growth and alleviation of mass poverty. There is substantial evidence that a very unequal distribution of income is not conducive to either economic growth or poverty reduction. Current experience of economic growth has shown that if countries put in place incentive structures and complementary investments to ensure that better health and education lead to higher incomes, the poor will benefit doubly through increased current consumption and higher future incomes. The pattern and stability of economic growth also matter. On the one hand, traditional capital-intensive, import-substituting, and urban-biased growth—induced by government policies on pricing, trade, and public expenditure—has generally not been good for alleviating poverty. On the other hand, agricultural growth—where there is a low concentration of land ownership and labor-intensive technologies are used—has almost always helped to alleviate poverty (Gaiha, 1993; Datt and Ravallion, 1998). Finally, sharp drops in growth—resulting from shocks and adjustments—may increase the incidence of poverty; and even when growth resumes, its incidence may not decrease if inequality has been increased by the crisis. Rural poverty accounts for nearly 63 percent of poverty worldwide, reaching 90 percent in China and Bangladesh and between 65 and 90 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. (Exceptions to this pattern are seen in several Latin American countries in which poverty is concentrated in urban areas.) In almost all countries, the conditions—in terms of personal consumption and access to education, health care, potable water and sanitation, housing, transport, and communications—faced by the rural poor are far worse than those faced by the urban poor. Persistently high levels of rural poverty, with or without overall economic growth, have contributed to rapid population growth and migration to urban areas. In fact, much urban poverty is created by the rural poor's efforts to get out of poverty by moving to cities. Distorted government policies, such as penalizing the agriculture sector and neglecting rural (social and physical) infrastructure, have been major contributors to both rural and urban poverty. Rural poor's links to the economy The rural poor depend largely on agriculture, fishing and forestry, and related small-scale industries and services. To understand how poverty affects these individuals and households and to delineate the policy options for poverty reduction, we need to know first who the rural poor are. They are not a homogeneous group. One important criterion for classifying the rural poor into groups is their access to agricultural land: cultivators have access to land as small landowners and tenants, and noncultivators are landless, unskilled workers. There is, however, much functional overlap between these groups, reflecting the poverty-mitigating strategies of the poor in response to changes in the economy and society. Cultivators, who form the bulk of the rural poor in developing countries, are directly engaged in producing and managing crops and livestock. Since these households cannot sustain themselves on the small parcels of land they own or cultivate, they provide labor to others for both farm and nonfarm activities inside and outside their villages. Some members of these households migrate to towns or cities on either a rotational or a long-term basis. In many countries, both small landowners and tenants are under increasing pressure to get out of the agriculture sector altogether. Underlying this process of "depeasantization" are market forces and policies affecting landholdings, rents, prices, credit, inputs, and public investment in the social and physical infrastructure. Noncultivators are perhaps the poorest among the rural poor. Their numbers have been rising rapidly because of the natural increase in population and depeasantization. These workers depend on seasonal demand for labor in agriculture and in rural informal, small-scale industries and services. The landless rural workers are vulnerable to fluctuations in the demand for labor, wage rates, and food prices. They find it even more difficult than small landowners and tenants to gain access to public infrastructure and services. In addition, unlike their counterparts in urban areas, they are often excluded from public sector safety nets (food rations, for example). Rural women tend to suffer far more than rural men. Their poverty and low social status in most societies is one of the most important reasons for chronic poverty. Substantial evidence from numerous countries shows that focusing on the needs and empowerment of women is one of the keys to human development. To understand poverty creation in rural areas and its effects on different groups, we should look at the assets that the poor own or to which they have access, and their links to the economy. The economic conditions faced by the rural poor are affected by a variety of assets (and the returns on them) held at the household, community, and supra-community levels. The poor's physical assets include natural capital (private and common property rights in land, pastures, forest, and water), machines and tools and structures, stocks of domestic animals and food, and financial capital (jewelry, insurance, savings, and access to credit). Their human assets are the labor pools—comprising workers of varying ages, genders, skills, and health—in the households and communities. Their infrastructural assets are publicly and privately provided transport and communications, access to schools and health centers, storage, potable water, and sanitation. Their institutional assets include their legally protected rights and freedoms and the extent of their participation in decision making in households and communities, as well as at the supra-community level. The first two categories of assets are largely regulated through formal and informal networks among individuals and communities. Most rural people, particularly women and those in landless households, are greatly handicapped by their dearth of assets and the low and volatile returns on these. The differences among the rural poor are more clearly reflected in their links to the economy, which determine how they use their assets and participate in production. All of the rural poor are engaged in the production of both tradable and nontradable goods and services. Artisans and unskilled workers provide many nontradable services and some nontradable products (such as staple foods) that small cultivators also produce. Only cultivators, however, have access to small parcels of land through ownership or (sharecropping) tenancy. They are also the only groups of poor people who own or rent physical capital such as tools, implements, and machinery. Artisans and small-scale farmers have only limited amounts of physical capital. They have only limited access to financial capital and acquire it largely through informal agents or institutions, except for tenants, who can use their landlords as conduits to formal credit. Borrowed capital is often costly and is used to maintain consumption during hard times or to buy supplies and equipment needed for farming. Households' labor is used both within the family—for work done by unpaid family members—and to earn the wages paid to landless, unskilled workers in farm and nonfarm activities. All groups of the rural poor are vulnerable to serious risk owing to changes in weather, health, markets, investment, and public policy. The resulting fluctuations in the prices and quantities of their assets and of what they produce can either deepen their poverty or give them opportunities to escape from it. The main reason is that the rural poor are ill equipped to absorb shocks. In addition, economic crises and natural disasters can bring about sharp increases in poverty and make it more difficult for the poor to escape it. How rural poverty is created Numerous characteristics of a country's economy and society, as well as some external influences, create and perpetuate rural poverty (Jazairy and others, 1992; Gaiha, 1993):
Policies for reducing rural poverty Boosting agricultural growth by applying new technologies is one of the most important ways to reduce rural poverty. However, the impact of such efforts on the rural poor depends on initial conditions, the structure of relevant institutions, and incentives. We know that agricultural stagnation has harmed the rural poor in sub-Saharan Africa by creating food shortages and higher prices that have reduced their ability to buy food and find work. Conversely, experience with the Green Revolution showed that rapid agricultural progress made a big difference in reducing rural poverty in parts of South Asia. Datt and Ravallion (1998) have found that higher crop yields reduce both the number of rural poor and the severity of rural poverty. But these effects are strong only if certain conditions are met. Since the rural poor are quite varied, we need to understand how macroeconomic changes and policies can affect them. The three major ways in which policies affect the rural poor are through markets, infrastructure (including public services), and transfers (Behrman, 1993). The markets in which the rural poor participate are those for products, inputs (labor and nonlabor), and finance (from formal and informal sources). Several important features of these markets can affect conditions in rural areas. The infrastructure that directly affects the rural sector's productivity and the rural poor's quality of life includes the economic (transport, communications, extension services, and irrigation) and the social (education, health care, water, and sanitation). Given that most elements of a country's infrastructure are provided through public funding, the level of spending, cost effectiveness, quality of service, and access of the rural poor to infrastructure and public services have important impacts on human capital and productivity in rural areas. Transfers, which are both private and public, provide some insurance against anticipated and unanticipated shocks. Most of the rural poor depend on private transfers among households, extended families, and other kinship groups. Public transfers can take the form of redistribution of assets like land, employment on public works projects, and targeted subsidies for inputs and some consumer products. These transfers supplement or displace private transfers, depending on the policy instrument and how it is used. An important point is that these channels—markets, infrastructure, and transfers— do not work in the same way for all of the rural poor because each group has quite different links to the economy. The policy focus should be on four major groups of the poor: small landowners who cultivate their land; landless tenants who cultivate other people's land; landless laborers who depend on casual or long-term employment in the farm or nonfarm sectors; and women, who could also be part of any of the three preceding groups. All of these groups will benefit from good macroeconomic management—which helps keep inflation in check and maintains unsubsidized prices—because it facilitates sustained economic growth through private investment and competitive markets. Needless to say, unfair laws or poor enforcement of existing laws, exclusion of the poor from decision making, and pervasive corruption in the public sector are no less detrimental to the well-being of the poor than they are to the country's overall economic growth. We can identify several policy components for national strategies—involving the government, the private (for-profit) sector, and civil society—to reduce rural poverty (Lipton, 1998).
Conclusion Macroeconomic stability, competitive markets, and public investment in physical and social infrastructure are widely recognized as important requirements for achieving sustained economic growth and a reduction in rural poverty. In addition, because the rural poor's links to the economy vary considerably, public policy should focus on issues of their access to land and credit, education and health care, support services, and entitlements to food through well-designed public works programs and other transfer mechanisms.
References: This article was derived from a longer paper by the author, "Rural Poverty in Developing Countries: Issues and Policies," which is No. 00/78 in the IMF's Working Paper series.
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