Aspirations and income, food security and subjective well-being in rural Ethiopia

Daniel Ayalew Mekonnen, Daniel Ayalew Mekonnen, Nicolas Gerber and Nicolas Gerber
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Daniel Ayalew Mekonnen and Nicolas Gerber

FOODSECURE Working papers from LEI Wageningen UR

Abstract: Despite some improvements in recent years, poverty and food insecurity remain widespread and the main challenges in Ethiopia. Using individual and household level data collected in rural Ethiopia, we examine if aspirations are strongly associated with well-being outcomes, as posited in the aspirations failure framework articulated by Ray (2006) and others. We employ both bivariate and multivariate analyses. We find that aspirations (particularly that of the household head) are indeed strongly associated with the household per-capita income and expenditure and with various triangulating measures of household food (in)security including per-capita calorie consumption, the food consumption score (FCS), the household dietary diversity score (HDDS), and the household food insecurity access scale (HFIAS). Contrary to a few other studies, we also find strong evidence that, in rural Ethiopia, aspirations are positively associated with satisfaction in life and/or happiness. Findings in this study provide suggestive evidence that policies aimed at improving well-being outcomes might benefit from multiple effects (both direct and indirect) if they incorporate aspirations raising strategies.

JEL-codes: D1 O1 Q1 Q12 Q16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-hap
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www3.lei.wur.nl/FoodSecurePublications/51_M ... elbeing_complete.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www3.lei.wur.nl:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
Working Paper: Aspirations and income, food security and subjective well-being in rural Ethiopia (2016)
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:fsc:fspubl:51

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FOODSECURE Working papers from LEI Wageningen UR Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Barbara van der Hout ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).