countries in the world today. As indicated in Figure 3, for a sample of 104 low and middleincome economies, real GDP per capita declines sharply with the share of the population in fragile environments. For all economies, the average GDP per capita is $1,952, but for those economies with less than 20% of their populations on fragile lands, real GDP per capita more than doubles to $3,961. In contrast, for those economies with 50% or more of the population in fragile lands, GDP per capita falls to $822 or less. According to the World Bank (2012), the low-income, or poorest, economies of the world are those in which 2009 Gross National Income per capita was $995 or less. Similarly, as Figure 4 indicates, developing economies with a large share of their rural populations located in remote areas tend to be relatively poor. Across 104 countries, the average (median) share of rural population in remote areas is 26.9% (18.7%), and the average (median) share of real GDP per capita is $2,075 ($1,100).

The relationship between GDP per capita, rural poverty and the share of populations concentrated in fragile and remote areas is summarized in Table 1. The table includes 89 developing economies that have, on average, at least 20% of their populations located on fragile lands and 30% of their rural populations in remote areas. Across all economies, the average real GDP per capita is $1, 613 and the rural poverty rate is 47.3%. In addition, several important trends emerge from the table. First, more than half (48) of the countries are low-income economies with real GDP per capita of less than $1,000. Second, none of the economies with GDP per capita greater than $4,000 have more than 50% of their populations located in fragile areas. Finally, the table confirms that lower-income economies generally have more of their populations concentrated in fragile and remote rural areas and higher rural poverty rates.

The rural poor will continue to be clustered on marginal lands, fragile environments and remote areas, given current global rural population and poverty trends. First, despite rapid global urbanization, the rural population of developing regions continues to grow, albeit at a slower rate in recent years. From 1950 to 1975, annual rural population growth in these regions was 1.8%, and from 1975 to 2007 it was just over 1.0% (Population Division of the United Nations 2008). Second, the vast majority of the world’s poor still live in rural areas, even allowing for the higher cost of living facing the poor in urban areas. In general, about twice as many poor people live in rural than in urban areas in the developing world (Chen and Ravallion 2007). Around 30% of the rural population in developing economies survives on less than $1 a day and 70% lives on less than US$2 a day, yet the respective poverty rates in urban areas are less than half of these rural rates (Chen and Ravallion 2007).

# **The "asset-less" poor and the environment**

Because the rural poor of developing economies are often concentrated in ecologically fragile and remote locations, these areas can become significant poverty traps. To understand why, it is important to identify the typical conditions facing the “asset-less” poor in such regions that influence their use of available natural capital.

The poorest rural households in developing economies have very few productive assets (Banerjeee and Duflo 2007). First, land is one of the few productive assets owned by the rural poor, and almost all households engage in some form of agriculture, but the size of landholdings tends to be very small. Second, poor rural households tend to rely on selling their only other asset, unskilled labor. Agriculture is generally not the mainstay of most these households; instead, they generally obtain most of their income from off-farm work as agricultural laborers or 6