On the Urbanization of Poverty

The author identifies conditions under
which the urban sector's share of the poor population
in a developing country will be a strictly increasing and
strictly convex function of its share of the total
population. Cross-sectional data afor 39 countries and
time-series data for for India are consistent with the
expected theoretical relationship. The empirical results
imply that the poor urbanize faster than the population as a
whole. But the experience across developing countries
suggests that a majority of the poor will still live in
rural areas long after most people in the developing world
live in urban areas.