The gulf in living standards is widening between cities and rural areas of developing countries that have large rural populations. Legacy as well as emergent factors contribute to this trend. An old urban bias from colonial and post-independence times was supplanted by a newer metropolitan bias...

Examining panel data for more than 13,000 rural Indian households over the 12-year period 1993-94 to 2004-05 confirms on a large scale what grassroots studies have identified before: two parallel and opposite flows regularly reconfigure the national stock of poverty. Some formerly poor people...