Abstract
The most recent century witnessed deep and rapid demographic change in Latin America characterized by rapid population increase owing to the demographic transition, and urbanization resulting from industrialization, immigration, and rural-to-urban migration. Our purpose here was to provide an entrée into the rural demography of Latin America by focusing on one of the region’s more demographically advanced, urban and prosperous nations, Chile. Analyzing data from the 2006 National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey we show that the 13% of Chileans who live in rural areas differ from their urban counterparts in important ways. Rural adults are more likely to be married and to cohabit, and to be elderly and residentially stable. Socioeconomically, rural residents have lower incomes, higher rates of illiteracy, and lower educational achievement. They are less attached to the formal labor force, and more likely employed in agriculture. Rural residents have less access to public utilities, fewer material possessions and less cultural capital. Future research needs to focus on several of the issues our descriptive analyses spotlight, notably rural economic disadvantage, rural-to-urban migration, and rural marriage and family.
The authors are, respectively, Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography and Ph.D. candidate in Rural Sociology and Demography in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology and the Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
We considered using the Chilean Census itself for this analysis. The Census is conducted every ten years by the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (National Statistics Institute) in years ending in 2. As 2002 was the most recent census and the CASEN has a somewhat wider range of variables available, we chose to analyze the CASEN.
- 2.
Because of space limitations, these and other results from our analysis of the CASEN data could not appear within the tables presented in this chapter. However, all CASEN results are available in tabular form from the authors upon request.
- 3.
Results not shown but are available in tabular form upon request.
- 4.
Results not shown but are available in tabular form upon request.
- 5.
Results not shown but are available in tabular form upon request.
- 6.
That the overall distribution diverges from a uniform 20% in each category reflects the fact that household size is greater among poorer households, such that, for example, the poorest quintile accounts for a greater than 20% share of all individuals.
- 7.
Results not shown but are available in tabular form upon request.
- 8.
Results not shown but are available in tabular form upon request.
- 9.
Results not shown but are available in tabular form upon request.
- 10.
Researchers would have a head start in this endeavor by consulting and capitalizing on data provided by the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) International project at the University of Minnesota. Here researchers can download census data from about a dozen of Latin America’s 38 countries. The great benefit of IPUMS International data for researchers is the effort that goes into harmonizing the variables in the data sets to make them maximally comparable across countries. We did not pursue this option here both because of the tremendous variation across countries in the definition of rural (sometimes defined administratively, sometimes according to various cutoffs for population size of place) and because of the greater breadth of variables available in the CASEN.
References
Bergquist, C. W. (1986). Labor in Latin America: Comparative essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brea, J. A. (2003). Population dynamics in Latin America. Population Bulletin, 58(1), 1–36.
Cabello, O. (1956). The demography of Chile. Population Studies, 9(3), 237–250.
CELADE (2003). Latin America and the Caribbean: Population ageing. Demographic Bulletin. Santiago, Chile: Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre.
Clapp, R. A. (1998). Regions of refuge and the agrarian question: Peasant agriculture and plantation forestry in Chilean araucania. World Development, 26(4), 571–589.
Conning, A. M. (1971). Rural community differentiation and the rate of rural-urban migration in Chile. Rural Sociology, 36(3), 296–314.
Conning, A. M. (1972). Rural urban destinations of migrants and community differentiation in a rural region of Chile. International Migration Review, 6(2), 148–157.
de Alcantara, C. H. (2008). Indigenous peoples, poverty and human development in Latin America. Development and Change, 39(1), 189–191.
Jensen, L., Yang, T., & Muñoz, P. (2011). Natural resource dependence: Implications for children’s schooling and work in Chile. Society and Natural Resources, 24(9).
Langton, K. P., & Rapoport, R. (1976). Religion and leftist mobilization in Chile. Comparative Political Studies, 9(3), 277–308.
López, R., & Anríquez, G. (2004). Poverty and agricultural growth: Chile in the 1990s. eJADE: electronic Journal of Agricultural and Development Economics, 1(1), 6–24.
Madaleno, I. M., & Gurovich, A. (2004). “Urban versus rural” no longer matches reality: An early public agro-residential development in periurban Santiago, Chile. Cities, 21(6), 513–526.
McMichael, P. (2008). Development and social change: A global perspective (4th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Pine Forge Press.
MIDEPLAN. (2006). Manual de Usario Base de Datos. Ministerio de Planificación y Cooperación. Santiago, Chile: Gobierno de Chile.
Palloni, A., Hill, K., & Aguirre, G. P. (1996). Economic swings and demographic changes in the history of Latin America. Population Studies, 50(1), 105–132.
Pizzolitto, G. (2005). Poverty and inequality in Chile: Methodological issues and a literature review. CEDLAS Working Paper 20, Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
Population Reference Bureau. (2009). World Population Data Sheet, 2009. Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau.
Portes, A., & Roberts, B. R. (2005). The free-market city: Latin American urbanization in the years of the neo-liberal experiment. Studies in Comparative International Development, 40(1), 43–82.
Portes, A., & Walton, J. (1976). Urban Latin America: The political condition from above and below. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Post, D. (2001). Children’s work, schooling, and welfare in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Psacharopoulos, G., & Patrinos, H. A. (Eds.). (1994). Indigenous people and poverty in Latin America: An empirical analysis. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Rojas, E., & Greene, M. (1995). Reaching the poor: Lessons from the Chilean housing experience. Environment and Urbanization, 7(2), 31–50.
Romero, H., & Ordenes, F. (2004). Emerging urbanization and the southern Andes: Environmental impacts of urban sprawl in Santiago de Chile and the Andean Piedmont. Mountain Research and Development, 24(3), 197–201.
Sabatini, F., & Salcedo, R. (2007). Gated communities and the poor in Santiago, Chile: Functional and symbolic integration in a context of aggressive capitalist colonization of lower-class areas. Housing Policy Debate, 18(3), 577–606.
Sigmund, P. E. (1986). Revolution, counterrevolution, and the catholic church in Chile. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 483(1), 25–35.
UNDP. (2010). Human Development Report 2009 – HDI rankings. Retrieved June 1, 2010, from http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/
Weeks, J. R. (1970). Urban and rural natural increase in Chile. The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 48(1), 71–89.
World Bank. (2010). Country classification, data and statistics. Retrieved June 1, 2010, from http://data.worldbank.org/country/chile
Acknowledgements
Infrastructural support was provided by the Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, which has core support from the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (2 R24 HD041025-06). The authors are responsible for any substantive or analytic errors.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jensen, L., Ader, D. (2012). The Demography of Rural Latin America: The Case of Chile. In: Kulcsár, L., Curtis, K. (eds) International Handbook of Rural Demography. International Handbooks of Population, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1842-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1842-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1841-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1842-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)