Amazon.com description: Product Description: "A welcome addition to the literature on poverty.... The book is full of interesting descriptions." --Economic and Political Weekly "Rethinking Rural Poverty is the result of painstaking research undertaken by the team of five researchers and makes absorbing reading. The incisive analysis of the poverty problem will be found to be useful by researchers as well as policy makers." --Journal of Rural Development "The authors of this valuable book have tried to analyse and disseminate the factors which are responsible for continued poverty in rural Bangladesh. All 17 essays have very lucidly highlighted the many facets of poverty as a state and as a process.... A thorough reading and clear understanding, particularly of the methodological and conceptual issues, will be of great help to researchers, policy-makers and programme implementors, particularly in the developing nations." --Deccan Herald Lacking neither in will nor in initiative, a majority of the rural population in the developing world lives bleak lives full of deprivation and vulnerabilities. Poverty is the making not of individuals, but of society and history. Today, rural poverty remains the single most important challenge for much of the developing world. Viewing poverty as a multidimensional reality, Rethinking Rural Poverty provides a penetrating look at this serious contemporary problem. Taking Bangladesh as a case study, it highlights the many facets of poverty not only as a state but as a process as well. Empirically rich and based on primary data, Rethinking Rural Poverty deals with the methodological challenges of rural poverty research, offering an innovative, one-of-a-kind contribution in the use of self-evaluations by the rural poor. Students of economics and development studies will appreciate the insights this text offers.