Appauvrie

Appauvrie is a French noun and concept that designates the process or state of becoming poorer. Derived from the verb appauvrir, it literally means the act of impoverishing, and in scholarly usage refers to sustained declines in wealth, income, or living standards experienced by individuals, households, communities, or regions. The term is used across economics, sociology, history, and development studies to describe both episodes of acute deterioration and longer-term trend lines of economic decline.

Causes of appauvrie are varied and can include extractive or failure-prone economic structures, deindustrialization, unfavorable terms of trade, external debt burdens, environmental degradation, natural disasters, conflict, and political or institutional factors that reduce investment and productivity. It can also reflect social vulnerability, where asset loss or income shocks erode resilience and widen inequalities.

In policy and research, appauvrie is often analyzed in terms of pathways from initial shocks to lasting impoverishment, the distributional impacts of growth, and the effectiveness of social protection, diversification, and sustainable development strategies to reverse declines.

While primarily used in French-language discourse, the concept aligns with English notions of impoverishment or persistent poverty and is related to discussions of poverty traps, economic decline, and development challenges. See also: impoverishment, poverty, economic decline, deindustrialization, resource curse, colonialism.