Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets
| dc.creator | Narain, Urvashi | |
| dc.creator | Gupta, Shreekant | |
| dc.creator | van 't Veld, Klaas | |
| dc.date | 2017-04-01T14:11:11Z | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-09T02:59:32Z | |
| dc.description | Using purpose-collected survey data from 537 households in 60 different villages of the Jhabua district of India, this paper investigates the extent to which rural households depend on common-pool natural resources for their daily livelihood. Previous studies have found that resource dependence- defined as the fraction of total income derived from common-pool resources-strongly decreases with income. Our study finds a more complex relationship. First, for the subsample of households that use positive amounts of resources, we find that dependence follows a U-shaped relationship with income, declining at first but then increasing. Second, we find that the probability of being in the subsample of common-pool resource users follows an inverse U-shaped relationship with income: the poorest and richest households are less likely to collect resources than those with intermediate incomes. Resource use by the rich is therefore bimodal: either very high or-for the very richest households-zero. Third, we find that resource dependence increases at all income levels with an increase in the level of common-pool biomass availability. The combination of these results suggests that the quality of natural resources matters to a larger share of the rural population than had been previously believed; common-pool resources contribute a significant fraction of the income not just of the desperately poor, but also of the relatively rich. | |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.22004/ag.econ.10694 | |
| dc.identifier | https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10694/files/dp050018.pdf | |
| dc.identifier | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10694 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/524366 | |
| dc.language | eng | |
| dc.publisher | ||
| dc.source | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10694 | |
| dc.title | Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets | |
| dc.type | Text |