Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that an individual’s position in an income stratum—more than the absolute income level—determines subjective well-being. However, studies on subjective well-being suffer from a critical methodological weakness: they use exogenously defined...

Livestock plays a pivotal role for smallholder production systems in mountainous Northern Vietnam. Economic risks, especially the loss of livestock, are major reasons for slipping into poverty. Normally, insurance systems could step in to assist. In developing countries however, insurance...

The Growth Enhancement Scheme and e-voucher program, rolled out across Nigeria in 2011 by the federal government, provided the institutional basis for private agro-dealers to engage in the distribution of subsidized fertilizer, improved seeds and extension services to farmers. However, the...

This article addresses one of the key challenges facing transitional and emerging economies: managing rural–urban migration to tackle rural decline and the associated rapid urbanisation. We introduce New Institutionalism as a novel conceptual framework to analyse the interactions between the...

Table of Contents: Gertrud Buchenrieder and Judith Möllers, The transformation of the rural economy in the new member states of the European Union: Implications for empirical analyses of rural structural change and livelihoods ... 1; Luka Juvančič and Tina Jaklič, Recent trends, drivers and...

The findings presented in this edited book are derived from the activities of the SCARLED (Structural Change in Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods) project. It had been co-financed by the European Commission and lasted from January 2007 until September 2010. SCARLED pursued two major research...

People use social comparisons to reduce uncertainty when facing new or stressful situations. This study explores how a stressful experience, the COVID-19 pandemic, changed how people compare their income. It relates these changes to subjective well-being (SWB). We use a repeated cross-sectional...

The paper uses up-to-date household data from two Northern-Albanian regions. It summarises socio-economic facts on taking up remunerative non-farm employment and identifies the determinants of non-farm income diversification at the farm household level based on a binary logistic regression....

This Discussion Paper documents a survey conducted in rural China in 2005. A multi-topic survey funded by the Sino-German international Training Program Sustainable Resource Use in North China, the project covers farm management, land property rights and rural credit access on the North China...