The Pattern and Determinants of Poverty in Rural Bangladesh: 2000-2010

This paper examines three aspects of rural poverty in Bangladesh: the trend of poverty over the decade of the 2000s, the evolving pattern of poverty among different population groups over the same decade, and major determinants of poverty in rural Bangladesh. It also tries to estimate the relative strengths of these determinants in order to see which factors are more important in quantitative terms. The paper compares the data from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2000 of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) with data from a large-scale survey of rural poverty carried out in 2010 by the Institute of Microfinance (InM) in Dhaka. Findings include:

• Rural poverty has declined at an accelerated pace over the decade of the 2000s;
• Rate of decline was not equal for everyone- some groups have fared slightly better than others;
• Contribution of within-strata decline in poverty towards overall poverty reduction has been overwhelmingly larger than that of movement of people from lower to upper strata;
• Factors that can make significant contribution to poverty reduction are access to assets, greater availability of working members within the household, education, access to non-farm employment opportunities, access to microcredit and foreign remittance, and greater connectivity.