How Social Status Contributes to Sustainable Livelihoods? An Empirical Analysis in Ethiopia

Aradom Gebrekidan Abbay, Roel Rutten, Hossein Azadi and Frank Witlox
Additional contact information
Aradom Gebrekidan Abbay: College of Business and Economics, Mekelle University, 231 Mekelle, Ethiopia
Roel Rutten: School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University, 90153 5000 Tilburg, The Netherlands
Hossein Azadi: Department of Geography, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Frank Witlox: Department of Geography, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-24

Abstract: This paper scrutinized the links between social status and income of rural households to provide insight into how social status is indicated and used as a strategy for improving livelihood income. It also provides a brief look into some selected key determinants of livelihood income. We applied a two-stage least-squares estimation to household-level data from rural areas in the Tigray regional state of Ethiopia. We also proposed the latent class analysis model to identify the number of classes for the variable “social status”. The results indicate that livelihood income is significantly affected by households’ social status, indicating that high status household heads tend to enhance their participation in different social networks with the intention of strengthening the social bonds that they have and improving their status in the community, which in turn has an economic payback. Apart from this, household heads’ access to off-farm work, size of owned land, exposure to multimedia, livestock ownership and spatial proximity to towns were the variables that have significant positive effects on livelihood income.

Keywords: status attainment; social networks; latent class analysis; two-stage least squares; Ethiopia; Livelihoods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/1/68/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/1/68/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2018:i:1:p:68-:d:192694

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().