FAO Agricultural Development Economics Working Paper, No. 23-05.

This working paper is the update of an earlier cross-country study on household income sources using an expanded harmonized dataset. The analysis presented covers a total of 93 surveys representing 41 countries – nearly double that of the previous study – to depict rural and urban households’ livelihood strategies across different levels of economic development. The findings shed light on the relationship between household livelihood activity portfolios and per capita gross domestic product, confirming a picture of multiple livelihood activities across the rural and urban space, at different levels of development. However, we find an emerging divergence between countries from sub-Saharan Africa and those from the rest of the world regarding employment and income generation.