Is Rural Income Diversity Pro-Growth? Is It Pro-Poor? Evidence from Georgia

Iain Fraser, Junior Davis, Kelvin Balcombe and Dirk Bezemer ()

No 4, Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Kiel 2005 from Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics

Abstract: This paper contributes to the literature on the role of on rural livelihood strategies in rural growth and poverty reduction. It distinguishes between livelihood diversity strategies that contribute to sustainable growth in household incomes, and those that mainly have a 'coping' function. It suggests that typically, the contribution of livelihood diversity to growing household income is through relaxing dependence on credit for access to capital. In this scenario, livelihood diversity would lead to higher technical efficiency in agriculture via investment and thereby to higher household incomes. Survey data from Georgia are introduced and used to test these hypotheses using a Bayesian stochastic frontier approach. The findings are relevant to defining more clearly the scope and aims of policies to stimulate the rural non-farm economy in developing and transition countries.

Keywords: livelihoods analysis; survey data; incomes; efficiency; Bayesian stochastic frontier approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cis and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/19797/1/Bezemer.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:gdec05:3477

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Kiel 2005 from Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().