ESA Working Paper No. 07-17

Rural Household Access to Assets

and Agrarian Istitutions:

A Cross Country Comparison

May 2007

Alberto Zezza

Agricultural Development
Economics Division
Food and Agriculture Organization,Italy
e-mail:Alberto.Zezza@fao.org

Paul Winters, Benjamin Davis, Gero Carletto, Katia Covarrubias, Esteban Quiñones, Kostas Stamoulis, Takis Karfakis, Luca Tasciotti, Stefania DiGiuseppe, and Genny Bonomi

PDF (399 KB)

Agricultural and Development Economics Division
The Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations

Abstract

Access to assets and agrarian institutions is of critical importance to the economic viability of rural households. Understanding the extent of this access and how it links to the ability of rural households to employ different pathways out of poverty is thus vital for designing rural development policies. This paper characterizes household access to assets and agrarian institutions through the comparative analysis of datasets from 15 nationally representative household surveys from four regions of the developing world. We find that the access of rural households to a range of assets ( including education, land and livestock) and institutions is in general low, though highly heterogeneous across countries, and by categories of households within countries. A large share of rural agricultural households do not use or have access to basic productive inputs, agricultural support services or output markets, and in general it is the landless and the smallest landowners who suffer significantly more from this lack of access.

Key Words: rural non farm, assets, agrarian institutions, household surveys.

JEL codes: O13, O57, Q12