Factors affecting extent of rural livelihood diversification in selected areas of Bangladesh

Abstract

The study was carried out to investigate the patterns and extent of livelihood diversification in rural Bangladesh. It also identified the major factors affecting extent of livelihood diversification. The study drew a random sample of 500 rural farm households in Bangladesh through a multi-stage sampling technique. The primary data were collected using semi-structured questionnaires, and analyzed using descriptive statistics and statistical techniques. The results showed that remittance contributed the highest to the household income followed by petty business and rice farming. The estimated values of Simpson Index of Diversification (SID) showed that majority of the rural households had "medium" and "high" level diversified livelihood activities. Tobit regression analysis found that gender of the household head, household size and amount of credit had positive and significant effects; and number of migrant household member, dependency ratio, household assets, education of the household head and amount of savings had negative but significant effects on the extent of livelihood diversification. The small and medium landholding households were more likely to diversify their livelihoods compared to the functionally landless and large landholding households. The study recommended that non-farm employment opportunities should be expanded to combat poor households' vulnerability to shocks and income fluctuations. Functionally landless households should be given more attention to increase and diversify their incomes.

Rural Livelihood Diversification in Nigeria: Implications for Labour Supply and Income Generation

“…This suggests that most of the households diversified their livelihoods into several options and earned higher amount of income from multiple livelihoods. Similar to these findings of Ahmed et al, (2018) who found high level of livelihoods diversification in rural Bangladesh as well as the findings of Verkaart et al, (2018) with evidence from Kenya.…”

“…The Simpsons Index of Diversity is generally expressed as; The value of SID ranges from zero (0) to one (1) such that zero (0) denotes specialization, the closer the value is to one, the more diversified the household and SID value of one (1) implies extreme diversification (Ahmed et al, 2018).…”

“…In accordance with the methods of Ahmed et al, (2018) and Djido and Shiferaw, (2018), the empirical SID model used in this study is expressed as follows;…”

Determinants of Livelihood Diversification of Rural Households in Sylhet

“…They identified the main occupations of the households of the rural people are mainly-Rice and non-rice crop, Petty business, Service or, Agricultural and non-agricultural laborer, remittance etc. The study also found that, remittance contributed highest share which accounts for 29% of the household's total income, followed by Petty business (20%) and rice crop (16%) [5].…”

“…In agriculture based economies like Bangladesh, this is often necessary where various types of risks are common which leads to low productivity, low output and invariably low income which continually trap the poor group in the vicious cycle of poverty. To avoid those risks in farming activity, households may shift to another non-farm or off farm activity which will provide them more income and less vulnerability [5]. For this reasons, Agriculture's share to rural household income dropped from about 60% in 1988 to 45% in 2008.…”