As Latin America’s population has become more urbanized, so has its poor. Today, about half of the region’s poor live in cities. Yet the phenomenon of urban poverty is not one that is well studied or well understood. Consequently, policy makers across the region are increasingly concerned about how to design programs and policies to tackle poverty.

Any advice on the matter, however, should take into consideration the answers to a number of questions:

• Do the determinants of poverty differ across urban and rural areas?
• Is the type of deprivation suffered by the poor in cities different from that which occurs in the countryside?
• Are different instruments needed to help the poor in urban versus rural areas?

The underlying hypothesis of The Urban Poor in Latin America is that, indeed, the causes of poverty, the nature of deprivation, and the policy levers to fight poverty are, to a large extent, site specific. The book, therefore, looks at strategies for helping the urban poor to make the most of opportunities offered by cities while also coping with the negative aspects of an urban environment. The information contained in the book is of particular interest to policy makers, development practitioners, and academics.

Download Free eBook: The Urban Poor in Latin America

PDF format, 2.3MB, 284Pages.

Marianne Fay, Editor
The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank
1818 H Street NW
Washington DC 20433
Telephone: 202-473-1000
Internet: www.worldbank.org

OVERVIEW
With three-quarters of its population living in cities, Latin America and the Caribbean is now essentially an urban region. Higher urbanization is usually associated with a number of positive developments, such as higher income, greater access to services, and a lower incidence of poverty. Latin America is no exception: today the urban poverty incidence, at 28 percent, is half that of rural areas, and the incidence of extreme poverty, at 12 percent, is one-third that of rural areas.

Despite this relatively low poverty incidence, the number of poor people is high, and most studies agree that about half of the poor in the region live in urban areas. The World Bank’s own estimates suggest that 60 percent of the poor (113 million people) and half the extreme poor (46 million people) live in urban areas.

Tackling urban poverty requires answering a number of questions. What is specifically urban about poor people living in cities? Are there different determinants of poverty in urban areas? Is the type of deprivation suffered by the poor in cities different from that in the countryside? And, most important, are the instruments to help the poor different in rural and urban areas?

Reviewing what is specifically urban about poor people living in cities reveals a number of facts that are salient to understanding the challenges facing the urban poor and the means to address these challenges. It also reveals three myths that tend to cloud judgment about urban poverty. All three spring from the common misperception that urban statistics are representative of the urban poor. In fact, because of the relatively low incidence of poverty in cities and Latin America’s high inequality, urban statistics are almost never representative of the urban poor. ...

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