This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage and solid waste disposal. We illustrate for one country-Morocco-that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper hinge on a specific definition of "urban area"; are driven by differences in the cost of living across city-size categories; by reliance on an income-based concept of wellbeing; or by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level. JEL Codes: I32, O18, R12 In the late 1970s and in the 1980s, there was much discussion of "urban bias" in development circles. Following Lipton (1977), development economists increasingly recognized a widespread tendency among (almost always urbanbased) governments to pursue policies that-explicitly or implicitly-taxed agriculture and transferred resources to industry and other urban activities.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

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