Elsevier

World Development

Volume 24, Issue 5, May 1996, Pages 901-914
World Development

Agroclimatic shock, income inequality, and poverty: Evidence from Burkina Faso

https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-750X(96)00009-5 Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper examines the impacts of agroclimatic shock on income inequality and poverty, using household-farm data from three agroecological zones of Burkina Faso together with income-source decompositions of the Gini coefficient and the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty index before and after a severe drought. Our findings reveal that, because the poor lack acces to off-farm income, off-farm income increases inequality and fails to shield poor households against agroclimatic risks. The direction of the empirical relationship between changes in inequality and poverty after the drought depends critically on environmental variables and on apparent constraints on income diversification at different points in the income distribution.

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      This income stream promises to become even more important in the months ahead, given how “women shoulder the main responsibility for caregiving in their households and rural communities, [and therefore,] they are more likely to be burdened with additional household tasks that increase when more people stay at home during a quarantine” (FAO, 2020, p. 3). For decades, rural African households have exhibited remarkable resilience coping with shocks and stresses, some of which have been severe (Reardon et al., 1988; Reardon & Taylor, 1996; Ellis, 1998; Little et al., 2001). For millions of families, ASM has been a crucial component of their diversified livelihood portfolios, a phenomenon which, again, several scholars have cast light on over the past decade.

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    No senior authorship is assigned. We thank ICRISAT via Peter Matlon for provision of the data, USAID Global Bureau, Office of Agriculture and Food Security via the MSU Food Security II cooperative agreement for funding, and John Strauss and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.

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