Poverty and the Environment: The Relationship between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets

CGD will host this seminar on poverty and the environment featuring Urvashi Narain, a Fellow at Resources for the Future. Jan Bojö, Lead Economist, Environment Department at the World Bank will offer comments.

Narain’s paper investigates the extent to which rural households depend on common-pool natural resources for their daily livelihood. Previous studies have found that resource dependence strongly decreases with income. Using new survey data from 537 households in 60 different villages of the Jhabua district of India, this study finds a more complex relationship. The results suggest that the quality of natural resources matters to a larger share of the rural population than had been previously believed. Common-pool resources contribute a significant fraction of the income not just of the desperately poor, but also of the relatively rich.

Click here to download paper

PLEASE RSVP BY OCTOBER 21TH TO events@cgdev.org