Rural Poverty

America's rural areas have always held a disproportionate share of the nation's poorest populations. Rural Poverty in the United States examines why. What is it about the geography, demography, and history of rural communities that keeps them poor? In a comprehensive analysis that extends from the Civil War to the present, Rural Poverty in the United States looks at access to human and social capital; food security; healthcare and the environment; homelessness; gender roles and relations; racial inequalities; and immigration trends to isolate the underlying causes of persistent rural poverty. Contributors to this volume incorporate approaches from multiple disciplines, including sociology, economics, demography, race and gender studies, public health, education, criminal justice, social welfare, and other social science fields. They take a hard look at current and past programs to alleviate rural poverty and use their failures to suggest alternatives that could improve the well-being of rural Americans for years to come. These essays work hard to define rural poverty's specific metrics and markers, a critical step for building better policy and practice. Considering gender, race, and immigration, the book appreciates the overlooked structural and institutional dimensions of ongoing rural poverty and its larger social consequences.

This book provides fresh insight into rural poverty in Latin America. It draws on six case studies of recent rural household surveys - for Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Paraguay, and Peru - and several thematic studies examining land, labour, rural financial markets, the environments, and disadvantaged groups. Recognizing the heterogeneity within the rural economy, the studies characterize three important groups - small farmers, landless farm workers, and rural non-farm workers - and provide quantitative and qualitative analyses of the determinants of household income.

Despite almost four decades and billions of dollars in development activities, we are barely in a position to track the changing dynamics of poverty or to define with conviction the processes that entrap the poor in their misery. Accounting for about 90% of global poverty, rural poverty, through transmigration, is also a main contributor to urban poverty. It is in the rural areas of the world where poverty is most severe in human terms, where the hunger, hopelessness, hardship, and despair commonly associated with entrenched poverty are most pronounced, where basic health services, sanitation, educational opportunities, and other common amenities are most lacking. The alleviation of rural poverty is therefore tantamount to the alleviation of global poverty in its entirety. The State of World Rural Poverty offers the first comprehensive look at the economic conditions and prospects of the world's rural poor.

Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was enacted, policy makers, agency administrators, community activists, and academics from a broad range of disciplines have debated and researched the implications of welfare reform in the United States. Most of the attention, however, has focused on urban rather than rural America. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty examines welfare participants who live in chronically poor rural areas of the United States where there are few job opportunities and poor systems of education, transportation, and child care. Kathleen Pickering and her colleagues look at welfare reform as it has been experienced in four rural and impoverished regions of the United States: American Indian reservations in South Dakota, the Rio Grande region, Appalachian Kentucky, and the Mississippi Delta. Throughout these areas the rhetoric of reform created expectations of new opportunities to find decent work and receive education and training. In fact, these expectations have largely gone unfulfilled as welfare reform has failed to penetrate poor areas where low-income families remain isolated from the economic and social mainstream of American society. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty sheds welcome light on the opportunities and challenges that welfare reform has imposed on low-income families situated in disadvantaged areas. Combining both qualitative and quantitative research, it will be an excellent guide for scholars and practitioners alike seeking to address the problem of poverty in rural America.

All men and women are subject to risk: illness, accident, death. Some shocks affect their ability to feed and support themselves properly, either temporarily: unemployment, crop failure, and loss of property; or permanently: disability, and skill obsolescence.This report summarises what is known and also what is not known about the sources of risk faced by the rural poor and their coping strategies. It examines the impact of risk and risk-coping strategies on development and the way in which governments and international organisations can assist in dealing with risk and overcoming poverty.

Moving beyond the highly visual forms of poverty characteristic of the city, Rural Poverty explores the nature of poverty in rural spaces in Britain and America. Setting out key features, it highlights the important processes that hide key components of rural poverty. The book seeks to challenge dominant assumptions about the spatialities of poverty and the nature of rural spaces in Britain and America. Drawing on a broad range of new research material, the book challenges dominant assumptions. It provides a comprehensive and critical review of the nature of poverty in rural spaces, giving particular attention to: the scale, profile and causes of poverty in rural areas the spatial unevenness and local geographies of rural poverty the experiences of different forms of poverty in rural spaces the shifting governance of rural welfare at central and local spatial scales. Demonstrating that poverty represents a significant but neglected feature of rural life in Britain and America, this insightful book highlights the processes through which rural poverty remains hidden from the dominant gazes of poverty researchers and policy-makers, the statistical significance and spatial unevenness of poverty in rural areas, the ways in which poverty is experienced in local rural spaces, and the complex governance of welfare in rural spaces. Case study material is drawn from a wide range of locations, including Wiltshire, Northumberland and Hampshire in the UK and New England in the US.

Reviews causes of poverty in rural areas and presents a policy framework for reducing rural poverty, including through land reform, public works programs, access to credit, physical and social infrastructure, subsidies, and transfer of technology. Identifies key elements for drafting a policy to reduce rural poverty.

Urban and Rural Poverty: Prevalence, Reduction Strategies and Challenges opens with a review of urban poverty in Bangladesh, analysing socioeconomic aspects of the marginal poor under three headings: migration and the urban poor, household characteristics, and neighborhood characteristics. Next, the authors investigate the extent of poverty in rural and urban Nigeria between 2004 and 2010. They examines the contributions of growth and redistribution factors to changes in poverty within the two sectors. The analysis was based on the National Living Standard Survey data of 2004 and 2009/2010 sourced from the National Bureau of Statistics and analysed using Shapley decomposition approach. This collection also examines how the socioeconomic characteristics of households influence rural poverty. The data for the study was extracted from the revised Nigerian General Household Survey data from 2010-2011, and a logistic regression technique was used to analyse said data. The authors argue that the improvement of rural access in developing countries is essential for the success of sustainable development goals, since poor access is one of the major causes of rural poverty and hampers rural development.The concluding chapter describes the experiences from a research project on modern logistic chains in the Mount Kenya region, demonstrating how small scale farmers organized, how important infrastructures such as rural roads, grading sheds and cooling devices were, as well as intermediate means of transport in combination with modern cooling logistics and communication technologies.