THE PREVALENCE OF RURAL POVERTY IN MEXICO

This paper provides a profile of the poor in Mexico based on 1989 data from INEGI's Income-Expenditure Survey. Due to a crisis-ridden agricultural sector, rural wage-workers and campesinos are both the most numerous among the poor and face the greatest depth and severity of poverty. Not unrelated, there is also significant poverty among the self-employed in nonagricultural sectors. These facts underscore the importance of explicitly integrating poverty-reduction objectives into Mexico's strategy of development and carefully targeting programs at the most severely poor, especially those in agriculture.