Main Causes Of Urban Poverty In The Developing Wor

257 Words2 Pages
According to Mike Davis, what are the main causes of urban poverty in the developing world? In your answer, please discuss the trend towards increasing urbanization. There are numerous causes, all of which are more or less intertwined, contributing to increased urban poverty in the developing world. The main problem starts off with defining and representing poverty in an accurate manner. Davis notes that slum populations are often times deliberately and massively undercounted. Where, for example, some of the major world organizations have insisted on defining slums not as a result of globalizations and inequality but rather “bad governance”. Furthermore, little or no planning has been done to accommodate the poor or provide them with services, even as basic as proper sanitation, clean water, transportation and waste collection. However, arguably one of the biggest causes of increasing poverty levels and inequality is the retreat of the state in the 1980s and 1990s. Privatization, removal of import controls and food subsidies, enforced cost-recovery in health and education, and downsizing of the public sector are just some of consequences that resulted in the late 80s, early 90s. In addition, as urbanization increases throughout the world, there has been a gradual decline in formal job creation. Informal workers are generally a surplus of unskilled, unprotected and low wage income workers who are not guaranteed the same rights, benefits and services as formal workers. Thus, through ignorance, lack of resources, lack of opportunities, increases in privatization and decreases in rights, urban poverty has increased significantly in the developing
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