Off-farm Activities, Incomes and Household Welfare in Rural Ethiopia
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Date
2020-04
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A.A.U
Abstract
Ethiopia has been a rural and agrarian society in all known history and remains so to this day. A survey of literature shows that the country’s focus has been on agriculture in terms of research interests and development policies. However, these agriculture-based approaches have not delivered on their promises to move rural households out of destitution and poverty. While various alternative growth paths to poverty reduction have been proposed, this dissertation focuses on off-farm economic activities. This dissertation makes the case for off-farm activities in four interlinked papers. This chapter gives a summary of the role played by off-farm participation and income on rural households’ welfare. It motivates the need for studying the relationship between off-farm income generating activities and rural household welfare in developing countries. It gives a unifying theme and an overarching conceptual framework within which the different studies in the dissertation fall. The first of the four papers discusses what drives off-farm participation and incomes. The remaining three papers explore the relationship between off-farm activities and concepts of household welfare – consumption smoothing, multidimensional poverty and vulnerability, and agricultural commercialization. The findings support that off-farm activities are important for rural households’ welfare and development policies should take note of this aspect.
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Keywords
Household welfare, Off-farm activities, Rural economy