Abstract: As a characteristic agricultural industry, flue-cured tobacco industry has made great contribution to rural poverty
reduction. Based on the panel data, an empirical study is made on the relationship and spatio-temporal evolution of tobacco
agricultural development and rural poverty with comparative advantage index, FGT index and moving window correlation coefficient.
The results show that the development advantage of flue-cured tobacco agriculture declined slightly during the observation period.
However, the evolution process has obvious phase characteristics, presenting a "stepwise" distribution feature that rises from east to
west in space. There is polarization in the advantages of the development of East China with the passage of time, and the western
regions has the internal adjustment of the spatial layout. Meanwhile, the rural poverty rate in the observation period has declined
significantly, the three regions over time showed the trend of convergence, but the slow process of rural poverty in different regions has
significant differences, showing the characteristics of "high in the West and low in the East". The relationship between the tobacco
industry and rural poverty is not stable, because there are great fluctuations both at the national and the provincial levels, and the
evolution process has obvious regional differences.

Key words: flue-cured tobacco industry, rural poverty, spatio-temporal evolution, evolution of correlation, moving window correlation
coefficient