Envelopment or development? The role of roads as conductors of change in upland areas of Sarawak, Malaysia

In most developing countries, rural development remains a high priority because the majority of the population, and of the poor, lives in rural areas. Nevertheless, progress in rural development has been hampered by structural and institutional biases against the rural poor. Lipton (1977), echoing the dependency theorists' notion of core-periphery relationships, has identified the problem of 'urban bias'. He argues that there is a systematic tendency for a country's resources to be unfairly and inefficiently distributed in favour of urban areas, to the detriment of people living in rural areas.