Rural Income Generating Activities : A Cross Country Comparison

By B. Davis, P. Winters, G. Carletto, K. Covarrubias, Esteban J. Quiñones, A. Zezza, K. Stamoulis, G. Bonomi, Stefania DiGiuseppe. 2007

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The general objective of this background paper is to analyze rural income generating activities in order to contribute to the design of more effective and better targeted rural development policies. The specific objectives are to examine the full range of rural income generating activities carried out by rural households in order to determine: 1) the relative importance of the gamut of income generating activities in general and across wealth categories, both at the level of the rural economy and the rural household; 2), the relative importance of diversification versus specialization in rural income generating activities at the household level; 3) the relationship between key household assets and the participation in and income earned from these activities; and 4) the influence of rural income generating activities on poverty and inequality. While there has been some focus in recent years on rural non-farm activities in the development literature, most of which are cited in this paper, a number of limitations suggest the need for further work. First, most of the previous literature has focused on the diversification into rural non-farm activities at the level of the rural economy. This is usually done by gauging the shares of different income sources over the rural population or over groups of rural households. This paper instead stresses the diversification and specialization of income generating strategies at the level of the rural household. Second, the methodologies of past efforts have typically not been comparable across countries. To meet the objectives of this Background Paper, the following areas are covered. In Section II, the authors describe the construction of the RIGA database. In Section III, they analyze the participation of rural households in rural income generating activities and the share of income from each activity in household income, over all households and by expenditure quintile. In Section IV they move from the level of the rural space to that of the rural household, examining patterns of diversification and specialization in rural income generating activities, again over all households and by expenditure quintile. In Section V, the report looks at the correlation of access to assets and demographic characteristics with participation in, and income from, the set of income generating activities over the countries in the RIGA dataset. In Section VI, it decomposes income inequality by income source, for all countries, using the Theil index. Conclusions are then presented in Section VII.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa3aa5cac35b504274e09ecfcda20025a6158451

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Citations in the corpus

Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa (2009, background): “Because the vast majority of poor African households are rural, and because the poorest of these typically derive between 60% and 100% of their income from agricultural activities (21), such temperature-related yield declines can have serious economic consequences for both agricultural households an”
Livestock sector development for poverty reduction: an economic and policy perspective. Livestock's many virtues. (2012, background): “This chapter reviews the role of livestock in the economy of rural households, drawing on published and grey literature and nationally representative household surveys compiled from FAO’s Rural Income-Generating Activities (RIGA) database (Davis et al., 2007) for 12 countries: four in Latin America ”
Rural development and poverty reduction: is agriculture still the key? (2007, background): “This proposition is further corroborated by the results of Davis et al. (2007), who show that despite income diversification by rural households, households in the lowest expenditure categories have a larger share of agricultural in their total income than households in higher income groups.”
The impact of rising food prices on the poor (2008, background): “The fact that the livelihoods of the poor are so diverse (see, for instance, Davis et al., 2007 and review therein) is an additional reason to dig deeper into the question of who can potentially gain or lose from the price increase, and to what extent.”
Patterns of income diversification in rural Nigeria: determinants and impacts. (2009, background): “This share of off-farm income fits reasonably well into the available recent literature for Sub-Saharan Africa (DAVIS et al., 2007; WOLDENHANNA and OSKAM, 2001), although the definition of what exactly constitutes off-farm income slightly varies across studies.”