Is Africa' rural economy transforming as its economies grow? This paper uses comparable income aggregates from 41 national household surveys from 22 countries to explore the extent of income diversification among rural households in Sub-Saharan Africa, and to look at how income diversification...

A widely accepted tenet of the development literature is that, in the process of structural economic transformation that accompanies economic development, the farm sector as a share of the country’s GDP will decline as a country’s GDP grows (Chenery and Syrquin, 1975). In rural areas, this...

This article proposes a general pattern of rural development in which increases in per capita income are associated with a decline in the importance of agricultural production and a rise in the importance of non‐agricultural income sources. Following the approach to examining Engel’s Law, we...

Cross country comparisons of rural income generating activities are analyzed to identify ways to design more effective and better targeted rural development policies. The full range of rural income generating activities carried out by rural households are examined, including: 1) the relative...