The importance of promoting growth and eliminating poverty in the rural sector has been well documented in the literature of Philippine economic development. Yet the rural sector in the country seems to be often left behind during periods when the country would experience modest growth and is also often hardest hit during periods of crisis. Seventy percent of the poor still live in the rural ar...

This study examines the empirical relationship among inequality, poverty and economic growth in India. Using data on consumption from the 13th to the 55th Rounds of the National Sample Survey, the author computes, for both rural and urban sectors, the Gini coefficient and three popular measures of poverty. The observed changes in inequality and poverty are explained in terms of the behaviour of...

Creating inclusive rural communities: Grass roots perspectives on the opportunities and challenges Rural communities in developed countries such as Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland have experienced profound challenges over the past three decades. The social fabric of rural communities in these countries has been and will continue to be affected by global and local pr...

Using data from 60 round of the National Sample Survey, this study attempts to measure the incidence and intensity of “catastrophic” maternal health care expenditure and examines its socio-economic correlates in urban and rural areas separately. Additionally, it measures the effect of maternal health care expenditure on poverty incidence and examines the factors associated with such impoverishm...

Nigeria represents one of the paradoxes of development in which case the nation is rich but her people are poor. This study examines the rate of poverty among rural households in South western, Nigeria. A random multistage sampling was employed for the study. Ekiti and Osun states were randomly selected from the six states in South-western Nigeria. This was followed by random selection of two L...

Rural households have been suspected to rely heavily on goods and services freely provided by environmental resources. However, there has been no adequate quantitative analysis of this issue due to a lack of appropriate household data sets encompassing economic and environmental data. We use a purpose-collected 213 household data set from rural Zimbabwe to investigate the impact of incorporatin...

BACKGROUND: More than 45% of SubSaharan Africa’s population is now estimated to be in poverty. The swelling poverty in Africa has increasingly focused governments, international donors, and researchers toward developing strategies that are “pro-poor.” Strategic plans for poverty reduction have been prepared since 1998 by at least 15 African governments with support from the World Bank. However,...

BACKGROUND Significant and persistent racial and income disparities in birth outcomes exist in the US. The analyses in this manuscript examine whether adverse birth outcome time trends and associations between area-level variables and adverse birth outcomes differ by urban-rural status. METHODS Alabama births records were merged with ZIP code-level census measures of race, poverty, and rurali...

Are roads the key to raising living standards in poor rural areas? This study evaluates the impact of the World Bank–financed Viet Nam rural transport project I, a large-scale rural roads rehabilitation project that aims to reduce poverty. The analysis will focus on the welfare impacts of rural roads as an input to policy discussion about how best to allocate scarce public resources for poverty...

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