ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how rural-urban linkages figure in the vast socioeconomic transformations that affect Monsoon Asia: decreasing importance of the agriculture, specialization of work, and recourse to subcontracting. It examines the weaknesses of a regional growth derived from rural-urban linkages, when the economic and social landscape was greatly transformed in Southeast Asia after the start of the economic crisis in 1997. The strengthening of rural-urban linkages was rendered possible in large measure by programmes of agricultural modernization and the economic, social and political evolution which they set in motion. Rural-urban linkages play a decisive role in this process which, at the very least in the plain, is accompanied by the increase of productivity and real income, and by inter-sector transfers to the most productive activities. The chapter examines how the strengthening of rural-urban linkages proceeds through the re-composition of lifestyles and the slipping of a traditional agrarian world towards an urban civilization.
