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...

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...

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...

Social capital has been recently held up as a conceptual framework to build a bridge between the diverse disciplines involved in rural development. However, despite its potential and the impressively rapid take-up of the concept by the community of development professionals, it remains an...

How do cultural practices influence the process of participatory governance within local administrative structures? We address this question by reflecting cultural dimensions, such as collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance within a contextual sensitive “cultural sensemaking”...

The rural out-migration of young people leads to problems such as “brain drain” and the overageing of the rural population. The purpose of this paper is to study return migration motives among students originating from rural areas. The case study relates to the province of Akmola, northern...

While the rural exodus dominates public and scientific debates, considerably less attention has been given to studying why the overwhelming majority of people worldwide remain immobile. As a consequence of this, the reasons why people stay, especially in economically weaker rural areas, are...

Despite the benefits associated with the free movement of people, governments often try to regulate urban immigration by constraining the agency of potential rural out-migrants in moving to cities and/or in expanding their agency to enable them to stay put. We apply an institutional framework...

Most policy and research interest regarding rural credit markets revolves around the perception that poor households in developing countries lack access to credit, which is believed to have negative consequences for household welfare. An important feature of the rural credit market is that...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...