This study investigated the impacts of a farmer field school (FFS) programme focused on farm forestry in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) in Kenya from 2017 to 2020. Specifically, we examined whether this agricultural extension approach enhanced livelihood diversification and reduced...

Many people in rural Africa still rely on smallholder agriculture as their main source of livelihood. Yet pursuing other economic activities beyond farming to diversify incomes becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we focus on the role of people's income aspirations in the process of...

This study explores financial literacy (FL) and its influence on market participation among rural residents in China. Using the 2017 China Household Finance Survey, we find that rural residents have low FL and answer only 33% of basic and 20.8% of advanced questions on average. The findings...

Migration from rural to urban areas is common in many low- and middle-income countries. However, temporary migration from rural to other rural areas also occurs and is not well understood. We explore what drives rural people in Bangladesh to migrate temporarily to other rural areas, rather than...

Rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa are typically underserved by financial services. Mobile money brings a substantial reduction in the transaction costs of remittances. We follow the introduction of mobile money for the first time in rural villages of Mozambique using a randomized field...

The study sheds light on the effects of COVID-19 on rural livelihood and economic stability. The pandemic crisis has immensely impacted the employment rate and agriculture in India. The rural population of India is majorly connected with agriculture as agriculture is the basic way of income for...

A large body of research shows that mobile money through its agent networks can potentially increase financial inclusion, especially in the unbanked rural regions of the developing world. This study intends to establish whether agent liquidity has a significant moderating effect in the...

This study examines the vulnerability of rural households in eight selected insurgency-affected communities using the household vulnerability index with particular consideration to six main components of socio-demographics, healthcare, food security, water resources, conflicts and marketing, and...

Migration from rural to urban areas is common in many low- and middle-income countries. However, temporary migration from rural to other rural areas also occurs and is not well understood. We explore what drives rural people in Bangladesh to migrate temporarily to other rural areas, rather than...

This study investigates the religious and other beliefs related to the corona/COVID-19 pandemic and how they are related to covid risk perceptions, trust in COVID vaccines, and how these are affected by the religious beliefs, religious affiliations, trust in authorities, generalized trust, and...

Living conditions in the rural area are precarious in Romania, our country being at the bottom of the European ranking, and the situation is getting worse as the degree of isolation increases (mainly in the hilly and mountain areas) combined with the precariousness of livelihood resources in...

Vietnam is a country that found itself at the center of the Indochina wars and was subjected to the most intense aerial bombing in history. However, little research has been done on the effect of unexploded ordnance (UXO) contamination on household livelihoods in rural Vietnam. In this paper, we...

Saving is an important factor in households' welfare in developing countries. However, most studies have focused on urban areas and at the macroeconomic level. Consequently, such studies mask the reality of rural households, which constitute a large proportion in Ethiopia. Hence, this study aims...

I examine the effect of in-kind staple transfers on agricultural production in a setting where transactions with markets are costly for households and result in interlinked consumption and production decisions. The expansion of India’s Public Distribution system between 1993-2009 led to large...

There is a growing interest in understanding the economic consequences of religious belief. Using unique dataset which surveys thousands of villages, this paper investigates the effect of religious beliefs on rural elderlies’ self-employment in China. The empirical results show that,...

We consider risk sharing in rural China during its rapid economic transformation from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. We document an erosion of consumption insurance against both household-level idiosyncratic and village-level aggregate income shocks, and show that this decline is related...

This paper examines whether workers living in rural areas are more likely to be self-employed, compared with those in urban areas. We provide evidence for 35 European countries, using the European Working Conditions Survey for the year 2015. We also study the time devoted to market work, and...

There is currently a major focus on digitization within African countries, with the interest of, on the one hand, increasing efficiency and lowering the cost-of-service delivery, and on the other hand, increasing financial inclusion for excluded parts of the population. Zambia provides an...