Labour calendars and rural poverty: Insights to guide rural transformation strategies

Many believe that, given their low productivity, agriculture and other rural occupations cannot represent a viable way out of poverty for most poor people in rural areas of developing countries. However, the income that people derive from jobs does not depend only on their productivity, but also on the total time they work throughout the year. A better understanding of rural labour calendars and employment seasonality is thus key to comprehend to what extent and how employment generation in rural areas can reduce rural poverty. In this webinar, Clarie Duquennois will present a method to construct labour calendars for rural areas and for specific crops. Using national household survey data from Malawi, she will show how total unemployment in rural areas can be decomposed between high-season unemployment and seasonal unemployment. Based on the results from this case study, she will also discuss how different agricultural and rural transformation strategies can increase employment, decrease labour seasonality, and eventually reduce poverty in rural areas. 

SPEAKER:

Claire Duquennois is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on labour and development economics, to which she applies insights from the behavioral economics field. She received her PhD for the University of California Berkeley in Agricultural and Resource Economics. Previously, she taught undergraduate economics for the University of Colorado Denver in Denver and Beijing.

Webcast