Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The relationship between poverty and city size in a selection of developing countries
基于八个发展中国家的数据，研究发现贫困发生率与城市规模呈反向关系，小城镇的贫困更普遍且更严重，且基础设施服务更匮乏。
This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage and solid waste disposal. We illustrate for one country -Morocco -that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper hinge on a specific definition of "urban area"; are driven by differences in the cost of living across city-size categories; by reliance on an income-based concept of wellbeing; or by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level.