Shocks and their consequences across and within households in Rural Zimbabwe

Increasing attention is now being paid to poverty dynamics in developing countries. This work links the extent to which households smooth consumption or smooth assets given income shocks, the empirical evidence on the churning of households in and out of poverty, and the possibility that temporary shocks can have permanent consequences. Using longitudinal data from rural Zimbabwe, this paper extends the discussion of these issues by disaggregating the impact of shocks by levels of asset holdings, by disaggregating the impact of shocks on individual level welfare and by assessing the extent to which such shocks have permanent consequences. By doing so, it assesses the validity of distinguishing between asset and consumption smoothing and provides insights into whether poverty dynamics assessed at the household level provide an adequate picture of dynamics at the individual level.     

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.     

Domestic Violence and Women’s Land Rights in Rural China: Findings from a National Survey in 2010

In recent decades, China undertook a series of agricultural land tenure reforms to increase the security of land use rights for rural households. While these reforms boosted agricultural production, they also increased landlessness among women due to patrilocal and patrilineal customs. Utilising data from China’s Women Social Status Survey conducted in 2010, this paper examines the impact of women’s land rights on the incidence of domestic violence in rural China. The results show that women who have lost claims to contract land or have no residential land face significantly higher risks of being physically or psychologically abused by their husbands.     

Weather Shocks and Urban Livelihood Strategies: The Gender Dimension of Household Vulnerability in the Kumi District Of Uganda

The Teso sub-region of Uganda suffered numerous weather shocks in the past, with devastating food security consequences. Using household fixed effects and propensity score matching methods, we analyse the impact of exposure to drought, flood and severe incidence of pests and diseases on household consumption expenditure per adult equivalent for a random sample of households from Kumi Town Council. We find that weather shocks reduce consumption by 17 per cent and that the consumption decline is significantly larger among female-headed households. We also find a higher likelihood of non-farm employment, borrowing and receiving remittances in order to cope with the shocks.     

The Role of Land Certification in Reducing Gaps in Productivity between Male- and Female-Owned Farms in Rural Ethiopia

This paper analyses the impact of a low-cost land certification programme on the productivity of female-headed households. The hypotheses tested in the paper emphasise on the interaction between the constraints that female-headed households face in terms of insecure land tenure, lack of productive resources and suboptimal land market participation, on the one hand, and the tenure security benefits of certification on the other. Our findings show that land certification has a positive effect on land market participation and productivity. Our analysis also suggests higher marginal effects of certification on female-headed households’ productivity, compared to the male ones.     

The Impact of Shocks on Gender-differentiated Asset Dynamics in Bangladesh

This study investigates changes in assets owned by the household head, his spouse, or jointly in response to shocks in rural agricultural households in Bangladesh with household survey panel data. Looking at changes within households over time, we find that weather shocks adversely affect the asset holdings of household heads relatively strongly, while predicted negative shocks more strongly lead to assets of both spouses being drawn down. The results, furthermore, suggest that jointly owned assets are not easily sold in response to shocks, and that women’s asset holdings and coping strategies are shaped by their lower involvement in agriculture.     

Joint Land Certification Programmes and Women’s Empowerment: Evidence from Ethiopia

This paper connects two important development policy issues: women’s empowerment and land certification. We use propensity score matching to study the impact of the Ethiopian joint land registration and certification programme on women’s empowerment. Data are collected using surveys and a field experiment, enabling construction of complementary indices for empowerment. Our main result is that joint land certification has significant effects on women’s empowerment, particularly on dimensions that indicate female participation and roles outside the home. This result is robust to various sensitivity checks and alternative model specifications.     

Gender,Land and Sexuality: Exploring Connections

This article explores links between the issues of sexuality and gendered control over agricultural land. It discusses gendered land rights in several settings, concentrating particularly on agrarian and land reforms. I argue that land redistribution in the “household” model, discussed for Chile and Nicaragua, tends to entrench male household and agricultural control. In contrast, more collective forms, discussed for Vietnam, have displayed economic weaknesses but had potential to undercut such control by socialising women’s labour. Fears about and visions of female sexuality have much to do with backlashes against inclusion of women, either through allowing them membership of cooperatives and collectives or through granting rights such as joint titling to land. In sub-Saharan Africa, there currently exists much discussion of improving women’s control over agriculture and its products. These continue to meet opposition, despite female predominance in agriculture in the region. Thus, even though women work on the land in many societies, this does not give them any automatic “closeness” to nature or say within households. Control over women’s, especially wives’, labour within peasant households, is linked to the manner that their persons and their labour are bound up in this socio-economic form. The article also examines two feminist attempts to configure alternative agricultural forms: the case of a lesbian agricultural collective in the west of the USA and an Indian model of new female-centred households for single women. Heterosexuality as an institution and gender subordination more broadly, as the examples here indicate, have to do not only with sexual practices or identity but extend also to issues of labour and access to crucial resources.     

Consumption vulnerability to risk in rural Pakistan

As one of the dimensions of vulnerability, this paper empirically investigates the inability of rural dwellers to cope with negative income shocks. A variable coefficient regression model is applied to a two-period household panel dataset collected in the North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, an area with high incidence of income poverty and low human development. The empirical model allows for a different ability to smooth consumption, approximated by a linear function of households’ attributes, and controls for the endogeneity of observed changes in income, using qualitative information on subjective risk assessment. Estimation results show that the ability to cope with negative income shocks is lower for households that are aged, landless and do not receive remittances regularly.     

Pathways into and out of Poverty: A Study of Rural Household Wealth Dynamics in Kenya

This study identifies the factors associated with smallholder farm households that have risen out of poverty or descended into poverty between 1997 and 2007 in Kenya. The study uses data from a nationwide balanced panel of 1,275 households and data from detailed retrospective ‘life history’ survey of 84 households that had experienced either an appreciable improvement or decline in their asset wealth over the 10-year panel period. The results indicate that household welfare dynamics are associated with a disparate set of idiosyncratic and unexpected shocks, such as death and chronic illness, demographic factors, proximity to infrastructural facilities, as well as intergenerational wealth transfers.     

When Faced with Income and Asset Shocks,Do Poor Rural Households in Vietnam Smooth Food Consumption or Assets?

Vietnamese rural households are exposed to severe covariate and idiosyncratic shocks. However, these households are remarkably resilient and have steadily increased real income and consumption over the survey period 2006 to 2012. To explain household strategies to cope with shocks we test three theoretical models: the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH), Complete Market Hypothesis (CMH), and Asset Smoothing Theory (AST). There is support for AST as households smooth productive assets rather than consumption; and for CMH as households smooth consumption against idiosyncratic, but not covariate shocks. There is no support for PIH.     

Female Land Ownership and Fertility in Nepal

This paper examines the association between female land ownership and fertility in Nepal using propensity score methods. A female land owner is found to have an average of 0.26–0.47 fewer children than her non-owner counterpart. Such negative female land-fertility trends are observed for women in different age groups. Evidence indicates that female land ownership promotes women’s wealth and decision-making authority, which could be the pathways through which their fertility is influenced. These findings imply that female land ownership could have substantial welfare benefits for women and population implications for countries.     

His,Hers, or Ours: Impacts of a Training and Asset Transfer Programme on Intra-Household Decision-Making in Zambia

This paper studies the effects of a multifaceted asset transfer programme on the decision-making dynamics of smallholder households. Constructing separate indexes of participation in household decision-making for adult females and males, and using difference-in-differences to assess the impact of livestock transfer and training, we find evidence that these interventions increased the share of decisions in which individuals participated, regardless of gender. Increases in decision-making participation by both men and women are driven by an increase in joint decision-making within the household on the extensive margin. Decisions made jointly by men and women increased by 16 per cent across all household activities, with statistically significant declines in independent decision-making by men and women. Findings are encouraging given the evidence of welfare gains associated both with increases in participation in decision-making by women as well as increased cooperation within households.     

An Unconditional Quantile Regression Based Decomposition of Spatial Welfare Inequalities in Ghana

Ghana has witnessed tremendous economic growth since the 1990s and attained the Millennium Development Goals target of halving poverty. This notwithstanding, inequality in Ghana increased over the same period, suggesting growth benefits were not equitably distributed. This study provides evidence on the determinants of household consumption expenditure and factors that explain rural-urban welfare gaps between 1998 and 2013. The study employs an unconditional quantile regression and recently proposed decomposition technique based on re-centred influence functions. We find significant spatial differences in consumption expenditure across selected quantiles, with rural-urban inequalities driven largely by differences in returns to households’ endowments.     

Estimation of Vulnerability to Poverty Using a Multilevel Longitudinal Model: Evidence from the Philippines

Using the panel data for the Philippines in 2003–2009, we estimate a three-level random coefficient model to measure household vulnerability and to decompose it into idiosyncratic and covariate components. We correct heterogeneity bias using Bell and Jones’s ‘within-between’ formulation. A majority of the poor and 18 per cent of the non-poor are found to be vulnerable to unobservable shocks, while both groups of households are more susceptible to idiosyncratic shocks than to covariate shocks. Adequate safety nets should be provided for vulnerable households that lack access to infrastructure, or are larger in size with more dependents and less-educated heads.     

Labour-Intensive Jobs for Women and Development: Intra-household Welfare Effects and Its Transmission Channels

We examine the welfare impacts of poor women getting low-skilled jobs and find large positive income, consumption and poverty effects at household and individual levels. However, the women workers, their husbands and oldest daughters reduced their leisure, but the women to a much larger extent. Investigating the transmission mechanisms suggests that the impacts did not only go through income effects, but also through a bargaining effect. Getting the job improved the bargaining power of the wife through several mechanisms, which in turn added substantially to the positive impact on household consumption.     

Contract Farming and Vulnerability to Poverty among Oil Palm Smallholders in Indonesia

This article addresses smallholder oil palm farming in Indonesia and the risk of falling into poverty by comparing contract and non-contract smallholders. We use an asset-based approach to define vulnerability and apply propensity score matching analysis to assess the impact of contract farming. Data were collected from a cross-sectional survey conducted in 2010 of 245 oil palm smallholder households, 126 of which were contract smallholders. The study finds that approximately 40 per cent of oil palm smallholders can be classified as stochastic-transient poor. We also show that while contract participation reduces the negative impact of oil palm price shocks, this is not the case for production shocks. The study concludes that despite positive income effects, contract smallholders also remain vulnerable to poverty.     

Coping with shocks in rural Ethiopia

Abstract

Using survey data and event history interviews undertaken in Ethiopia, we investigate which shocks trigger which coping responses and why. Relatively covariate natural and economic shocks trigger reductions in savings and in food consumption, while relatively idiosyncratic health shocks prompt reductions in savings and a reliance on borrowing. Surprisingly, across all shocks, households do not rely on gifts from family and friends, highlighting the need for formal protection systems. We argue that the insensitivity of food consumption to health shocks does not imply insurability but indicates that it is not a viable response to such a shock.     

Cash Transfers Enable Households to Cope with Agricultural Production and Price Shocks: Evidence from Zambia

Climate change is projected to dramatically disrupt rainfall patterns and agricultural yields in sub-Saharan Africa. These shocks to food production can mire farming households in poverty traps. This study investigates whether unconditional cash transfers can help households cope with agricultural production and price shocks. We find that cash empowers poor, rural households facing these negative shocks to employ coping strategies typically used by the non-poor and enables them to substantially increase their food consumption and overall food security. Extending relatively small cash payments unconditionally to the rural poor is a powerful policy option for fostering climate-resilient development.     

Participation in Micro-Finance Programmes and Women’s Mental Health in South Asia: A Modified Systematic Review

Micro-finance provides financial services to poor women from developing countries where cultural and social constraints limit their opportunities for economic advancement. Using Forbes’s process of conducting systematic review, 12 quantitative studies from South Asia reporting on the impact of micro-finance on women’s mental health outcomes were analysed. Overall, studies revealed that the duration and depth of involvement in micro-finance activities would make a difference in women’s mental health and not just receiving loans; however, rigorous programme evaluation is needed. Collaborative actions by micro-finance and health care practitioners to recognise women’s mental health needs and to strengthen measures to optimise the beneficial effects of micro-finance must be considered.