ABSTRACT
Migration to urban areas is the key driver of the rural population’s relative decline. Poverty is in turn one key driver of migration. And poverty rates are considerably higher in the rural areas than in the urban: of the United Nations (2011) estimate of 1.4 billion people living on less than US$1.25/day in 2005 (since updated to 1.3 billion in 2010 by the World Bank (Chen and Ravallion, 2012), approximately one billion – around 70 per cent – lived in rural areas (IFAD, 2011); and a majority of the world’s poor will be rural for many decades to come. Again, there is much variation by region: in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa, a majority of the poor now live in urban areas, while in South Asia, South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, over three-quarters of the poor still live in rural areas. Looking at the location of poverty through a different lens, Sumner (2011) makes two important points: first, as many developing countries have progressed from low-income country status to become middle-income countries (MICs), fully three-quarters of the
world’s poor now live in MICs; and, second, less than a quarter of the world’s poor now live in fragile and conf lict-affected countries.
