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

Alberto Zezza, Paul Winters (), Benjamin Davis, Calogero Carletto, Katia Covarrubias, Esteban Quiñones, Kostas G. Stamoulis and Stefania Di Giuseppe ()

No 7925, 106th Seminar, October 25-27, 2007, Montpellier, France from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: 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 representative 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 and 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.

Keywords: Consumer/Household; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/7925/files/sp07ze01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Rural Household Access to Assets and Agrarian Institutions: A Cross Country Comparison (2008)
Working Paper: Rural Household Access to Assets and Agrarian Institutions; A Cross Country Comparison (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:eaa106:7925

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.7925

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 106th Seminar, October 25-27, 2007, Montpellier, France from European Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().