Markets and Marketplaces: Essays on Access and Transformation in Remote Rural Economies

Summary

Development dissertation brief

Following an extraordinary global reduction in extreme poverty over the last century, progress on eliminating poverty has slowed. The latest figures show that the number of people in extreme poverty has in fact risen in sub-Saharan Africa. The remaining pockets of poverty worldwide are increasingly concentrated in remote rural areas.

My thesis “Markets and marketplaces: Essays on access and transformation in remote rural economies” (2022) consists of four chapters asking how people in such regions can efficiently get access to income opportunities and essential services. Empirically studying remote rural areas is challenging, because – almost by definition – data is scarce. Measurement of outcomes is typically based on farm or household surveys, which provide great detail, yet often capture only specific moments in time and are, due to their costly collection, limited in scope. Therefore, another theme connecting the chapters in the thesis is the reliance on various forms of satellite data which can help overcome critical data scarcities.