Living in darkness: rural poverty in Venezuela

Why Have China’s Poverty Eradication Policy Resulted in the Decline of Arable Land in Poverty-Stricken Areas?

“…Consequently, following the increase in per-unit grain production, farmers may emphasize land conservation and sustainability. They may implement measures to reduce soil erosion, unregulated expansion, and unsustainable land utilization, ensuring the land can maintain high productivity over the long term [50,51]. This shift can obviate the need for large-scale land expansion, enabling better management and conservation of existing land resources to ensure long-term agricultural sustainability.…”

Measuring Regional Inequality in the Andean Countries: A Multiple-Stage Nested Theil Decomposition Using Night Light Emissions

“…3 Economic and social opportunities are often unequally distributed across regions, and poverty tends to concentrate in areas with lower economic development and resource access. In many cases, these regions are rural areas (Rodríguez-Pose and Hardy 2015; Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC, 2018; Kharas et al 2020;Maldonado 2023), not densely populated and where agriculture is the primary source of income, and urban slums, weak and densely packed housing units where inhabitants have limited access to essential services (such as clean water, sanitation, education, and healthcare) and fewer job opportunities (Stampini et al 2015). For example, about 38 percent of the rural population in the Andean region faced income poverty in 2021 (11.3 million people), while 31 percent were urban poor (37 million people).…”

“…Nighttime lights from satellite imagery are often used in regional analyses to track economic activity and economic development (Dai et al 2017;Wang et al 2019;Andrade-Núñez and Aide 2020;Gibson and Boe-Gibson 2021;Maldonado 2022;McCord and Rodriguez-Heredia 2022), and socioeconomic and political outcomes (Hodler and Raschky 2014;Bruederle and Hodler 2018;Ferreira 2018;Jagnani and Khanna 2020;Maldonado 2023). These studies rely on the assumption that night light emissions implicitly capture relevant information about spatial heterogeneity and human impact on a local level.…”

“…Moreover, urban areas concentrate electricity and energy infrastructure, emitting an intensity of light likely captured by sensors aboard satellites. In contrast, electrification is inferior in rural areas or agricultural regions, mainly because it is far from national grids, thus leading to less intense lighting (Keola et al 2015;Ferreira 2018;Smith and Wills 2018;Maldonado 2023). In this sense, uneven light emissions across the territory may signaling different degrees of development and economic activities.…”

“…In Ecuador, Cabrera-Barona et al ( 2020) mapped urban representations of the Ecuadorian Amazon using a geospatial approach, and Mejía Juárez (2020) analyzed the evolution of urban uses using the magnitude and intensity of nighttime light data. In Peru, Seminario and Palomino (2022) estimated subnational GDP from 1993 to 2018. carried out a spatiotemporal analysis relating light emissions with multiple variables to evaluate the socioeconomic crisis that suffers Venezuela, while Maldonado (2023) actually combined the absence of high intensity of lights and gridded population datasets to estimate 2000-2020 rural poverty rates at different geographic levels of Venezuela. Furthermore, satellite data as an alternative source is particularly important for analyzing developing countries, which are often limited or lack robust subnational indicators to diagnose regional disparities.…”