Traps and Thresholds in Pastoralist Mobility

Russell Toth

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2015, vol. 97, issue 1, 315-332

Abstract: This article presents a new approach to identifying poverty traps in East African pastoralist communities. A flexible semiparametric estimation procedure is used to identify a bifurcation in the propensity to engage in the asset-based, mobile herding livelihood, in comparison to the sedentary alternative, as a function of herd size. The identified threshold is consistent with previous evidence on poverty traps based on modeling herd stock dynamics. The approach contributes to an emerging literature that seeks to identify poverty traps through testing the implications of the posited behavioral mechanism behind the trap, as opposed to directly modeling asset dynamics. The approach is further employed to provide complementary evidence on the relationship between ability and assets in sustaining mobile pastoralism.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aau064 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Traps and Thresholds in Pastoralist Mobility (2010)
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:oup:ajagec:v:97:y:2015:i:1:p:315-332.

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().