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Poverty and the Environment-Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets and Natural Assets

Urvashi Narain, Shreekant Gupta and Klaas van 't Veld (klaas@uwyo.edu)
Additional contact information
Urvashi Narain: Resources for the Future, Washington DC
Shreekant Gupta: Delhi School of Economics

No 134, Working papers from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract: Using purpose-collected survey data from 535 households in 60 different villages of the Jhabua district of India, this paper investigates the extent to which rural households depend on common-pool natural resources for their daily livelihood. Previous studies have found that resource dependence-- defined as the fraction of total income derived from common-pool resources--strongly decreases with income. Our study uncovers a more complex relationship. Firstly, for the subsample of households that use positive amounts of resources, we find that dependence follows a U-shaped relationship with income, declining at first but then increasing. Secondly, we find that the probability of being in the subsample of common-pool resource users follows an inverse U-shaped relationship with income - the poorest and richest households are less likely to collect resources than those with intermediate incomes. Resource use by the rich is therefore bimodal - either very high or--for the very rich households--zero. Thirdly, we find that resource dependence increases at all income levels with an increase in the level of common-pool biomass availability. The combination of these results suggests that the quality of natural resources matters to a larger share of the rural population than had previously been believed, common-pool resources contribute a significant fraction of the income not just of the desperately poor, but also of the relatively rich.

Keywords: India; Madhya Pradesh; poverty; environment; common-pool natural resources; rural households (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 I32 O13 Q12 Q2 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2005-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets (2010) Downloads
Journal Article: Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship Between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets (2008) Downloads
Working Paper: Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets (2005) Downloads
Working Paper: Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets (2005) Downloads
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