Kommentar af Edward B. Barbier
Over 1/3 af alle, der bor på landet i Den 3. Verden, lever i en økonomisk og geografisk udørk, fanget dybt nede i fattigdomsfælden. Vi taler om hundreder af millioner og problemet vokser.
More than one-third of the rural population in developing countries lives on less-favored agricultural land, according to global spatial (rumlige) datasets from 2000. How, then, does this distribution influence the incidence of poverty in these countries?
To address this question, our paper “Poverty and the Spatial Distribution of Rural Population” investigates two types of spatial distributions across 83 developing countries over a 10-year period: rural populations on less-favored agricultural lands and in less-favored agricultural areas.
Less-favored agricultural lands are constrained by difficult terrain, poor soil quality, or limited rainfall.
Less-favored agricultural areas include less-favored agricultural lands plus favorable agricultural land with limited access to markets (i.e. five hours or more travel to a market city with a population of at least 50,000).
Drejer sig om næsten 2,7 milliarder
Our spatial analysis of the distribution of rural populations across 124 developing countries in 2000 reveals that around 36 per cent (1.31 billion people) were located on less-favored agricultural land, and over 37 per cent (1.38 billion) in less-favored agricultural areas.
About eight per cent of the rural population (288 million) was concentrated on remote less-favored agricultural lands located far from market centers, which also comprises 22 per cent of all the rural population on less favored agricultural land in developing countries.
Given this evidence confirming that a sizable proportion of the rural population is located on less favored lands and in remote areas, we developed two hypotheses as to how this spatial distribution of rural populations might impact poverty in developing countries.
FIRST, the concentration of rural populations on less-favored agricultural land and areas may have a direct influence on changes in poverty, and SECOND, it may have an indirect influence through attenuating the poverty-reducing impact of income growth.
Læs videre på
http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/geographical-poverty-traps-rural-areas-growing-global-problem
Begynd fra: “To test these two hypotheses empirically, we examined how the spatial distributions of….”
Edward B. Barbier er økonomiprofessor på Wyoming Universitet i USA.
Kilde: Verdensbankens blogunivers.
