Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets

41 Pages Posted: 1 Dec 2005

See all articles by Urvashi Narain

Urvashi Narain

World Bank

Shreekant Gupta

University of Delhi - Delhi School of Economics

Klaas van 't Veld

University of Wyoming - Department of Economics

Date Written: April 29, 2005

Abstract

Using purpose-collected survey data from 535 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 uncovers a more complex relationship. Firstly, 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. Secondly, 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 rich households - zero. Thirdly, 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 previously been believed; common-pool resources contribute a significant fraction of the income not just of the desperately poor, but also of the relatively rich.

Keywords: Natural resource dependence, poverty, biomass degradation

Suggested Citation

Narain, Urvashi and Gupta, Shreekant and van 't Veld, Klaas, Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets (April 29, 2005). PREM Working Paper No. 05/09, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=850071 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.850071

Urvashi Narain (Contact Author)

World Bank ( email )

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Shreekant Gupta

University of Delhi - Delhi School of Economics ( email )

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Delhi-110007
India
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+91 11 27667159 (Fax)

Klaas Van 't Veld

University of Wyoming - Department of Economics ( email )

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Laramie, WY Wyoming 82071
United States
+1 307-766-4028 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.uwyo.edu/economics/faculty-staff/faculty/klaas-t-vantveld.html

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