Joint production and consumption in traditional households: Fuelwood and crop residues in two districts in Nepal

Forest conversion by agricultural households is the leading cause of deforestation. Yet we know little about agricultural household use of forest and tree products. This article measures household production of and demand for fuelwood and fuel substitutes in two districts in Nepal. Women play a larger role in collection in the district dependant on production from common forestlands. Men and agricultural capital are more important inputs in the district dependant on production from private lands. The article also measures demand elasticities for fuelwood, combustible agricultural residues, and improved stoves (a technological substitute), each by household income group. All price and income demand elasticities are less than one. The substitution elasticities between residues and fuelwood are less than one. Residues are more important substitutes for low income households and improved stoves are more important substitutes for high income households.     

Labour supply and wages among nuclear and extended households: The Surinamese experiment

This article explores labour market behaviour of members of extended and nuclear households in Suriname. Previous analyses have found that co‐operative childcare opportunities within the extended household increase female labour force participation. Such coordination implies correlated participation decisions, which invalidates standard assumptions made in estimating participation with probits and wages with regressions. We employ a GMM estimation, which allows correlation among household members. We find that extended and nuclear household members are not significantly different in participation propensities, but do differ significantly in wages. We argue that greater home production opportunities in extended households dilute labour market effort and hours, reducing earnings.     

Disease,Microdams and Natural Resources in Tigray,Ethiopia: Impacts on Productivity and Labour Supplies

We examine the effects of water microdams and ensuing waterborne diseases on household decisions in Tigray, Ethiopia, where the government implemented a water resource development programme two decades ago. We find microdams increase productivity of both fuelwood collection and crop production, but the costs of these dams to households can be significant. In villages close to dams, disease prevalence is higher and all household labour categories spend more time sick, and more time is spent by male and female adults caring for sick family members. These can cost the household anywhere in the region of 150–250 Birr per season, depending on the type of labour diversion and the productivity of labour. Males are most significant here. Removing their time from production results in 40–60 per cent higher productivity and income losses compared to diversion of female labour. Sick households also spend significantly more money on health care, especially when male and female adults are sick.     

Does Health Insurance Reduce Child Labour and Education Gaps? Evidence from Rwanda

A common practice of poor households to informally deal with risk is to allocate children’s time away from school towards income-generating activities or household production. Focussing on Rwanda, this study investigates whether the provision of formal health insurance helps to prevent this undesired risk coping strategy. We find that children of households enrolled in health insurance work significantly less compared to those of not enrolled families, and also have better educational achievements. The results suggest that policy interventions which reduce household risk exposure may have additional benefits in terms of lower child labour supply and higher schooling levels.     

Cultural Effects and Savings: Evidence from Immigrants to the United Arab Emirates

This study attempts to investigate the effects of cultural origin on the saving behaviour of immigrants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Using household survey data covering 3206 households, savings rates are found to be remarkably different across households from different countries/regions. Immigrants from developing countries appear to be uniform in terms of average household size, age, education and occupation. However, immigrants from Pakistan and India are found to have higher average savings rates than those from Arab countries, although they have relatively lower incomes. This suggests strong cultural effects on savings, a proposition that is generally supported by the econometric findings of this research.     

Impacts of Migration on Household Production Choices: Evidence from China

Abstract

The great migration from Chinese farms to cities during the past several decades ranks among the most economically consequential of modern population movements. We use a national sample of rice-producing Chinese households to examine the effects of that migration on agricultural production. Our assessment involves evaluating four alternative theories of labour market equilibrium in the framework of an expanded agricultural household model. Migration’s farm production impacts appear to be slight, not on account of farm labour market perfections or remittance-financed technological improvements, but by substituting a reduction in leisure and other low-return activities for lost labour.     

Fairness and Efficiency in Smallholder Farming: The Relation with Intrahousehold Decision-Making

Agricultural households face collective action dilemmas when making decisions about investments in their common household farm and the allocation of resources and benefits derived from it. We relate intrahousehold decisions, as measured in a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted with spouses in agricultural households in western Uganda, with actual investments and intrahousehold resource allocation. Intrahousehold decision-making that supports cooperation and equitable sharing is associated with greater investment in the intensification of cash and food crop production, and more equitable access and control over income. Freeriding behaviour by husbands is associated with the intensification of cash crop production, but not with equitable sharing.     

Using Stated Preferences and Beliefs to Identify the Impact of Risk on Poor Households

Whilst the importance of uncertainty in shaping economic behaviour of poor households is widely acknowledged, empirically identifying the impact of risk is difficult. By using data on risk preferences and perceptions of risk collected through hypothetical questions in combination with more traditional measures of a household's ability to deal with risk, this article identifies the impact of risk on production decisions. It shows both that data on stated preferences and beliefs can be usefully utilised to explain household behaviour, and that risk has a significant impact on the production decisions of poor households.     

Persistent poverty in North East Ghana

This paper explores local poverty and wealth inequality in the Upper East Region of northern Ghana in the period from 1975–89. Land was not scarce and the social management of household membership and household labour were critical to household security, but this social management was not independent of wealth status. There was a virtuous circle between wealth and household labour supply and a vicious circle between poverty and small household size. Poverty traps existed so that those with too little labour and too little wealth engaged in strategies which entrenched them in poverty.     

The Effects of Improved Roads on Wages and Employment: Evidence from Rural Labour Markets in Indonesia

This paper examines the impact of road quality on labour supply and wages using household panel data from rural Indonesia. The analysis uses fixed-effect instrumental variable estimation by first differencing two-round panel data. First, road projects are found to increase the transportation speed. Second, the empirical results from intra-village variations of household endowments and labour-market behaviour show that an increase in transportation speed raised wages in both non-agricultural and agricultural employment, and was associated with a decline in working time in agricultural employment, for the households whose members are relatively educated. The findings support potential complementarity between road quality and education, implying that the government’s public investments in roads and education should be coordinated to capture cross-augmenting positive impacts in the long run.     

Water Availability and Reliability in Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s water landscape is unjust, inequitable, and uneven. Water rationing and electricity outages affect water availability alongside an overall shortfall in water supply. Using household surveys and interviews, this paper shows that a majority of respondents lack a consistently reliable source of water. To cope with poor access, households alter their daily routines, consume less water, and identify and use back-up sources of water. It is crucial to understand the problems of water availability in the city in order to make more informed policy decisions and more justly provide water access.     

Wage – labour activities by agricultural households in Nicaragua

This article considers wage?–?labour activities by agricultural households in Nicaragua. It analyses the role of: (1) comparative advantage as determined by individual and household characteristics; and (2) agricultural conditions and market imperfections, in shaping wage?–?labour supply. An econometric specification is developed which allows for random household-specific effects. Results reveal that non-agricultural wage work is largely determined by comparative advantages, whereas agricultural wage work is used to deal with a number of agricultural conditions and market imperfections.     

Tenure Insecurity,Gender, Low-cost Land Certification and Land Rental Market Participation in Ethiopia

There is a renewed interest in whether land reforms can contribute to market development and poverty reduction in Africa. This paper assesses effects on the allocative efficiency of the land rental market of the low-cost approach to land registration and certification of restricted property rights that was implemented in Ethiopia in the late 1990s. Four rounds of a balanced household panel from 16 villages in northern Ethiopia are analysed, showing that land certification initially enhanced land rental market participation of (potential) tenant and landlord households, especially those that are headed by females.     

Sanitation and Religion in South Asia: What Accounts for Differences across Countries?

Exposure to open defecation has serious consequences for child mortality, health, and human capital development. South Asia has the highest rates of open defecation worldwide, and although the incidence declines as household income rises, differences across South Asian countries are not explained by differences in per capita income. The rate of open defecation in sub-national regions of Bangladesh, India and Nepal is highly correlated with the fraction of the population that identifies as Hindu, in part because certain rituals of purity and pollution discourage having latrines in close proximity to one’s home. Almost all open defecation occurs in rural areas, and this paper estimates how much the rate could be reduced if rural households in regions that have a higher fraction of Hindus, where open defecation is still common, altered their behaviour to reflect that of non-Hindu households in regions that are predominantly non-Hindu, where the rate of open defecation is much lower. Using nonparametric reweighting methods, this paper projects that rural open defecation in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal could be reduced to rates of between 6 and 8 per cent, compared to the prevailing level of 65 per cent.     

Supply Response and Risk in Chinese Agriculture

The main objective of this paper is to model the production and supply response in Chinese agriculture, which includes not only the standard arguments like expected prices but also risk. We extend Lin's work [1991, 1992] by modelling supply response as a three-equation model. We fit our model to data for 28 Chinese provinces from 1970 to 1997 to determine whether national Chinese agricultural supply is price and price risk responsive. Further, we fit our model to data for North, Northeast, South and Southeast regions. Results from the three systems equations are compared to single equation estimations. At the national level, Chinese agriculture is found to be price and price risk responsive. The regional analyses suggest that significant regional differences exist. Unlike Lin, we do not find the household responsibility system (HRS) to be the dominant factor in increased yields in different regions of China.     

The importance of household asset diversity for livelihood diversity and welfare among small farm colonists in the Amazon

Taking a small farm colony on the Amazon frontier as a case study, this article examines the relationships among household assets, livelihood diversity and welfare. The findings show that: (1) few households diversified into non-agricultural income sources, but those that did also had agricultural incomes comparable to households primarily reliant on agriculture; (2) distinct household assets influence the extent of agricultural and non-agricultural diversity, implying that households with combinations of specific assets were best able to diversify their livelihoods, and (3) while specific types of household assets influence household welfare, livelihood diversity does not exert an additional effect on welfare. A key issue that emerges is that different arrays of assets are important for agricultural and non-agricultural diversity as well as for household welfare, implying that households need diverse assets for diverse livelihoods as well as better welfare.     

Natural Disasters,Gender and Handicrafts

Using original post-disaster household survey data gathered in rural Fiji, this article explores the disaster–gender nexus. Female-headed households are disadvantaged, not because of bias against them in disaster damage or relief, but because of a newly emerging gendered division of labour for dwelling rehabilitation that tightens their constraints on intra-household labour allocation. Female-headed households with damaged dwellings resort to female labour activities connected with informal risk sharing – augmenting production of handicrafts for kava rituals in exchange for male-labour help. Female-headed households without male-adult members resort to such activities more than those with them, because of their distinctly different decision-making processes.     

Analysing the Impact of Price Shocks in Rural Economies: Do Household Responses Matter?

We analyse the impact of higher food prices on rural households in Tanzania focusing on the often neglected role of households’ behavioural responses. We introduce a new framework which considers the production response jointly with substitution effects in consumption and takes into account households’ market participation choices. Taking into account behavioural responses on consumption and production can significantly alter the sign and magnitude of the welfare impact in the long run.     

Comparing village characteristics derived from rapid appraisals and household surveys: A tale from northern Mali.

This paper investigates whether inferences drawn about a population are sensitive to the manner by which those data are obtained. It compares information obtained using participatory appraisal techniques with a survey of households randomly drawn from a locally administered census that had been carefully revised. The community map tends to include households that do not, in fact, reside in the enumerated locality. By contrast, the revised official census is slightly more likely to exclude households who actually lived in the surveyed area. Controlling for the survey technique, we find that the revised official census produces higher estimates of average household size and wealth but lower estimates of total village size or wealth, than the community map. Pairwise comparison of the survey techniques, holding the households constant, shows that the community map leads, on average, to higher estimates of household size and lower estimates of wealth.     

The Effect of Risk Preferences on Household Use of Water Treatment

This paper uses Mexican household data on water treatment to provide empirical evidence on the relationship between risk preferences and use of preventive health measures. The main finding is that in households with children, more risk-averse mothers are more likely to treat the water the household consumes. This result suggests that while households may face external constraints on their behaviour, personal preferences are also determinants of their choices.