Recent surveys show that about half of preschool children and mothers in rural Bangladesh are undernourished. Households consume low-quality diets with little diversity because they lack the resources to grow or purchase micronutrient-rich foods. The low dietary intake of micronutrients has negative consequences for child growth and development and for women’s health and productivity. This chap...

BACKGROUND Malaria is a serious public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa and is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. AIM To estimate the economic burden of malaria in rural households. SETTING The study was conducted in Gwanda district of Matabeleland South in Zimbabwe. A total of five malarious wards and all their households were selected for the study frame, out of which 80 hous...

The paper discusses the institutional reforms for rural electrification (RE) in Thailand and Bangladesh and analyses the impacts of private sector participation in electricity generation and tariff reforms on the poor in Thailand. RE program in Thailand, initiated in 1977, increased electricity access by rural households from 7% in early 70s to 97% by 2000. In Bangladesh the RE program, initiat...

Deindustrialization as well as a dramatic decrease of the labour needed in food productioncharacterise the development on the Norwegian countryside the recent decades. This analysis examines how rural households in danger of losing income opportunities develop new income strategies in remote Norwegian areas. The regional restructuring processes have brought ruralhouseholds different pos...

This study used 510 representative households to profile the poverty status of rural farming households in North Central Nigeria based on gender of the household heads. The Foster, Greer and Thorbecke class of weighted poverty indices as well as social indicators were used as analytical tools. The results of the study showed that the female-headed households were disadvantaged on all counts wit...

The paper analyzes the decision-making of rural Chinese households on whether to stay exclusively on farm, take local off-farm jobs or migrate. Based on a survey of rural Chinese households, we examined the determinants of job location choice of rural China. We extend the dynamic discrete choice model of Wooldridge (2002a,b) to the three-alternative setting and apply it to a five-year panel. We...

In 2003, the Chinese government launched in a rural area a voluntary health insurance plan, called New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), aiming to prevent rural residents from becoming impoverished by health expenditures. This paper uses a nation-wide four-year panel data to address county selection problem, households' participating behavior, and the impact of the plan. The results show: 1) C...

This paper uses comparable income aggregates from 41 national household surveys from 22 countries to explore the patterns of income generation among rural households in Sub-Saharan Africa, and to compare household income strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa with those in other regions. The paper seeks to understand how geography drives these strategies, focusing on the role of agricultural potentia...

This paper examines the extent of consumption insurance against income risk by households in rural India. We estimate the effects of income changes on consumption after controlling for aggregate shocks through changes in village level consumption and household size. We also test whether there is a systematic wealth effect on the extent of consumption insurance against idiosyncratic income shock...