Working poverty and costly conflicts : some worrying signs from a field study in Bangladesh

In vast markets of developing economies, especially in South Asia, both seasonal rural migrants and their threatened urban workers constitute a bulk of the new class of working poor and are truly marginal in terms of their socio-economic status. In this paper our contributions are three fold: first, we examine the economic and political significance of working poverty from a field study undertaken in Bangladesh. Secondly, from the field study we determine the causal factors behind working poverty. Finally, we rationalize the link between working poverty and the possibility of violent conflicts in a South Asian society like Bangladesh.