Publication: Rural Income Generating Activities: Whatever Happened to the Institutional Vacuum? Evidence from Ghana, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Vietnam
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Date
2009
ISSN
0305750X
Published
2009
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This paper assesses the current rural development practice against the main trends in recent rural development thinking, based on evidence from four country case studies. While much progress has been made in understanding the need to look beyond only agriculture for the promotion of productive activities in rural areas, and the "institutional vacuum" consistently identified in the rural non-farm (RNF) literature is gradually being filled, much remains to be done. One aspect on which more research is particularly needed is the development of better mechanisms to promote productive investment rather than just social investment and to assess the appropriate level--community, regional, and national--at which to do this.
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Publication Rural Income Generating Activities : A Cross Country Comparison(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008)Cross country comparisons of rural income generating activities are analyzed to identify ways to design more effective and better targeted rural development policies. The full range of rural income generating activities carried out by rural households are examined, including: 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 generation; 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. 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.Publication Rural Household Access to Assets and Agrarian Institutions : A Cross Country Comparison(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008)Access to assets and agrarian institutions is of critical importance to the economic viability of rural households. Understanding the extent of this access and how it links to the ability of rural households to employ different pathways out of poverty is thus vital for designing rural development policies. This paper characterizes household access to assets and agrarian institutions through the comparative analysis of datasets from 15 nationally representative household surveys from four regions of the developing world. It finds that the access of rural households to a range of assets (including education, 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 and the smallest landowners who suffer significantly more from this lack of access.Publication Patterns of Rural Development: A Cross-Country Comparison Using Microeconomic Data(2010)This article proposes a general pattern of rural development in which increases 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 dataset to test whether such a pattern emerges. The analysis shows a strong, positive relationship between per capita income and the share of income earned from rural non-agricultural wage employment and a negative relationship between per capita income and agricultural production.Publication Assets, Activities and Rural Income Generation: Evidence from a Multicountry Analysis(2009)This paper examines the links between the assets and the economic activities of rural households in developing countries to provide insight into how the promotion of certain key assets-particularly education, land, and infrastructure-influences the economic choices of these households. Nationally representative data from 15 countries which form part of the rural income-generating activities (RIGA) database are used in the analysis. The results indicate that improved land access is linked to agricultural production and thus will lead households to take, on average, this path for improving household welfare. Higher levels of education and greater access to infrastructure appear to be most closely linked to non-agricultural wage employment. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Publication A Cross-Country Comparison of Rural Income Generating Activities(2010)This paper uses a newly constructed cross-country database composed of comparable income aggregates to examine the full range of income generating activities carried out by rural households. The analysis paints a clear picture of multiple activities across rural space in countries on all four continents, though less so in the included African countries. For most countries the largest share of income stems from off-farm activities, and the largest share of households has diversified sources of income. Diversification, not specialization, is the norm. Nevertheless, agricultural sources or income remain critically important for rural livelihoods in all countries. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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