Elsevier

World Development

Volume 23, Issue 9, September 1995, Pages 1495-1506
World Development

Links between rural poverty and the environment in developing countries: Asset categories and investment poverty

https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-750X(95)00061-GGet rights and content

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the links between poverty and the environment in rural areas of developing countries. It introduces the concept of “investment poverty” and relates it to other measures of poverty in analysis of these links. The notion of poverty is examined in the context of categories of assets and categories of environment change, with particular focus on farm household income generation and investment strategies as determinants of the links. The strength and direction of the poverty-environment links are shown to differ (even invert) depending on the composition of the assets held by the rural poor and the types of environmental problems they face. Policy strategies need to focus on conditioning variables that affect market development, community wealth, infrastructure, household asset distribution, and the affordability and appropriateness of natural resource conservation technologies.

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      Previous literature covered extensively the topic of vicious cycles between poverty and environmental degradation (Barbier and Di Falco, 2021). Reardon and Vosti (1995) underscore that the type of poverty and the type of lacking assets influence the poverty-environment linkages. How poverty is measured also matters, because poverty is a multi-dimensional concept: whether it is the poverty in terms of consumption expenses or in terms of ownership of broader category of assets (Reardon and Vosti, 1995).

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    No senior authorship is assigned. The authors are grateful to USAID/Global Bureau, Office of Agriculture and Food Security via the Food Security II Cooperative Agreement at Michigan State University, and to the Government of Japan. We are also grateful to Peter Hazell, Michael Lipton, James Oehmke, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Sara Scherr, Scott Swinton, Julie Witcover, Tim Frankenberger, and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments.

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