Determinants of Farmers’ Land Use Decision-Making: Comparative Evidence From Thailand and Vietnam

Trung Thanh Nguyen, Loc Duc Nguyen, Rattiya Suddeephong Lippe and Ulrike Grote

World Development, 2017, vol. 89, issue C, 199-213

Abstract: Understanding farmers’ land use decision-making is of interest to policy makers and scientific communities. Furthermore, comparing farmers’ land use decision-making between countries offers a functioning instrument to enhance this understanding, since one country can benefit from the experiences of another. This study extends the sustainable livelihoods framework to examine and compare the factors affecting farmers’ land use decision-making regarding land use choices and crop diversification. A panel dataset of 514 farm households in Ha Tinh (Vietnam) and 422 farm households in Ubon Ratchathani (Thailand) collected in 2007 and 2013 is used for the analyses. The results reveal that (i) farmers’ land use decision-making is determined by various factors representing the livelihood platforms, weather shock experience and expectation, and physical-economic conditions of the living localities, and (ii) crop diversification is a weather shock-coping strategy of rural households. We suggest that (i) promoting farm land reconsolidation and privatization, (ii) enhancing access to credit sources and national electricity networks, and (iii) improving rural road conditions and attracting investments in rural non-agricultural sectors contribute to reducing farmers’ vulnerability to climate variability.

Keywords: rural livelihoods; weather shocks; panel data; seemingly (un)related regression (SURE); fixed effects models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (59)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15307853
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:wdevel:v:89:y:2017:i:c:p:199-213

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.08.010

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().