Abstract: The persistence of rural poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is a major challenge for meeting the Sustainable Development Goal on poverty eradication. Using detailed data for Malawi, we investigate the association between seasonality in labor calendars and poverty. We find that (1) seasonality in rural labor calendars runs deep, accounting for 2/3 of total rural underemployment and occurring across most household activity choices, and (2) gaps in rural-urban welfare are principally associated with differences in time worked, in turn associated with large seasonality differentials in labor calendars, rather than with labor productivity differentials when people work. The implication is that reducing rural seasonality in labor calendars should be a major objective in seeking to reduce rural poverty. Methodologically, we show that labor calendars can be constructed from standard annual rural household survey data with information on labor use by crop and task.
Presented by:
- Claire Duquennois, Assistant professor, Department of Econo0mics, Pittsburgh University
Date: 2 March 2022
