Question

What is urban bias as one of the key factors for rapid urbanization? Giving an case study example, briefly provide a few viable recommendations to address the problem of urban bias.

Answer 1

Basically, the term urban bias resulted in the uneven distribution of all the national resources, saturated urban labour market and rapid growth of urbanization. Urban bias has led to major industrialization in the urban areas and therefore, urban areas are bringing more employment opportunities and provision of better goods and services to improve the urbanization of cities and towns. Michael Lipton considered urban bias resulting in poor agriculture and infra-structural reforms in the rural areas. The theory of urban bias refers to the obstacles in the path of economic development created by groups residing across urban areas.

Let us consider a case study example of Bangladesh which Lipton mentions frequently in this research proposals for the subject topic. According to his study, the most obvious evidence of the existence of urban bias seems to be higher levels of income of urban people. Lipton produces such figures to show that in Bangladesh, urban income is 1.5 to 3 times as higher as rural income. The table below shows the average household income per month in rural and urban areas:

Urban bias has been traced as the main cause of rural poverty and this can be traced against the backdrop that rural agricultural products fetch little prices on the urban markets whereas as if this was not enough most developing countries favors the economic policies associated with import substitution a system of replacing foreign trade with domestic production. Import substitution is based on the premise that a country should attempt to reduce its foreign dependency through the local production of industrialized products, African urban bias is often likened to Latin American experiences with import substitution strategies and welfare state development which were often implemented at the expense of the rural poor (Collier and Collier, 1991) however import substitution perpetuates poverty for the rural agrarian communities that depend on the export markets to sell their agricultural produce at higher prices hence import substitution strategies hurt farmers at the expense of manufacturing interests and urban workers hence it is arguably true to contend that the urban bias largely causes poverty in rural areas.