Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets

Urvashi Narain, Shreekant Gupta and Klaas van 't Veld ()

No 10694, Discussion Papers from Resources for the Future

Abstract: Using purpose-collected survey data from 537 households in 60 different villages of the Jhabua district of India, this paper investigates the extent to which rural households depend on common-pool natural resources for their daily livelihood. Previous studies have found that resource dependence- defined as the fraction of total income derived from common-pool resources-strongly decreases with income. Our study finds a more complex relationship. First, for the subsample of households that use positive amounts of resources, we find that dependence follows a U-shaped relationship with income, declining at first but then increasing. Second, we find that the probability of being in the subsample of common-pool resource users follows an inverse U-shaped relationship with income: the poorest and richest households are less likely to collect resources than those with intermediate incomes. Resource use by the rich is therefore bimodal: either very high or-for the very richest households-zero. Third, we find that resource dependence increases at all income levels with an increase in the level of common-pool biomass availability. The combination of these results suggests that the quality of natural resources matters to a larger share of the rural population than had been previously believed; common-pool resources contribute a significant fraction of the income not just of the desperately poor, but also of the relatively rich.

Keywords: Food; Security; and; Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 117
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets (2010)
Working Paper: Poverty and the Environment-Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets and Natural Assets (2005)
Working Paper: Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:rffdps:10694

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.10694

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