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Rural Household Access to Assets and Agrarian Institutions: A Cross Country Comparison








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    Rural Household Access to Assets and Agrarian Institutions
    A Cross Country Comparison
    2007
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    Agriculture is at the core of the livelihoods of a large share of rural households throughout the developing world. Agricultural growth is a major engine for overall economic growth and possibly the single most important pathway out of poverty in the rural space. This paper characterizes household access to assets and agrarian institutions of households engaged in agricultural activities in a sample of developing countries. The evidence presented in the paper draws from 15 nationally representat ive household surveys from four regions of the developing world. We find that the access of rural households to a range of agricultural-specific assets (including land and livestock) and institutions is in general low, though highly heterogeneous across countries, and by categories of households within countries. A large share of rural agricultural households do not use or have access to basic productive inputs, agricultural support services or output markets, and in general it is the landless a nd the smallest landowners who suffer significantly more from this lack of access. We relate this to the households’ ability to engage successfully in commercial farming and find consistent supporting evidence for the hypothesis that this lack of access is significantly constraining their potential to engage successfully in agriculture.
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    Patterns of Rural Development: A Cross-Country Comparison Using Microeconomic Data 2008
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    This article proposes a general pattern of rural development in which rises in per capita income are associated with a decline in the importance of agricultural production and a rise in the importance of non-agricultural income sources. Following the approach to examining Engel’s Law, we use data from 15 developing countries and a merged data set to test whether such a pattern emerges. The analysis shows a strong, positive relationship between rising per capita income and the share of income ear ned from rural non-agricultural activities and a negative relationship between per capita income and agricultural production.
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    Rural Income Generating Activities: A Cross Country Comparison 2007
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    This paper uses a newly constructed cross country database composed of comparable variables and aggregates from household surveys to examine the full range of 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; 2), the relative importance of diversification versus specialization at the household level; 3) the relationship between key household assets an d the participation in and income earned from these activities; and 4) the influence of rural income generating activities on poverty and inequality. Analysis of the RIGA cross country dataset paints a clear picture of multiple activities across rural space and diversification across rural households. This is true across countries in all four continents, though less so in the African countries included in the dataset. For most countries the largest share of income stems from off farm activities, and the largest share of households have diversified sources of income. Diversification, not specialization, is the norm, although most countries show significant levels of household specialization in non-agricultural activities as well. Nevertheless, agricultural based sources of income remain critically important for rural livelihoods in all countries, both in terms of the overall share of agriculture in rural incomes as well as the large share of households that still specialize in agricultu ral sources of income.

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