The pro-poor impact of non-crop livelihood activities in rural Vietnam: A panel data quantile regression analysis

Tuyen Tran and Huong Van Vu

Economic Analysis and Policy, 2020, vol. 68, issue C, 348-362

Abstract: Using a household panel dataset for the 2008–2016 period, we analyze the heterogeneous effects of livelihood change on household well-being in rural Vietnam. We use an unconditional quantile regression (UQR) model with fixed effects to control for unobservable time-invariant household characteristics. We find that when a fixed-effects estimator is employed, households switching from a crop livelihood to any non-crop livelihood (e.g., livestock, wage-earning, nonfarm, private or transfer livelihoods) increase their per capita income and food consumption. However, the results from the UQR with fixed effects reveal a significant variation in the effect of such a switch in livelihood across various quantiles of well-being distribution, with a larger effect for poorer households. The income effect, however, tends to decline with higher quantiles and even turns negative with a switch to a wage-earning or public transfer livelihood for the better off. Notably, our study confirms the pro-poor impact of changing livelihood from crop to non-crop activities in rural Vietnam. Our research results also suggest that a mean regression approach that often assumes a homogeneous/mean effect of livelihoods on well-being, may miss some heterogeneity that is useful to researchers and policy makers.

Keywords: Crop livelihood; Fixed effects; Pro-poor; Income; Unconditional quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C23 C31 O12 P Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0313592620304331
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:ecanpo:v:68:y:2020:i:c:p:348-362

DOI: 10.1016/j.eap.2020.10.005

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Analysis and Policy is currently edited by Clevo Wilson

More articles in Economic Analysis and Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().