Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'.
Bio: Andrey Nikolayevich Illarionov is a Russian economist and former economic policy advisor to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. He works as a senior fellow in the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC.