Driving Forces of Rural Poverty and Distributional Change in Sub-Saharian Africa: The Cases of Burkina Faso, Ghana and Uganda

拟议的研究项目旨在确定撒哈拉以南非洲农村贫困和分配变化的主要驱动力。具体地说，分析将涉及布基纳法索、加纳和乌干达的案例研究，其中将考虑家庭收入的微观和当地以及宏观决定因素。虽然每个案例研究本身都会揭示有趣的结果，但其目的是总结一般性的经验教训，即案例研究共同形成的结果应该多于各部分的总和。关于农村贫困和分配变化决定因素的现有文献大体上可分为分析针对家庭和地方一级变化的农村家庭行为的研究，以及试图在分配结果与具体宏观经济冲击或政策之间建立联系的研究。综上所述，这两股文献涵盖了可能影响农村家庭的大部分因素，但这些文献在几个方面似乎并不完整。属于第一类的研究往往侧重于农村创收的具体方面，因此没有考虑到家庭收入的微观决定因素之间的相互作用，也没有追溯微观变化到宏观一级的变化。文献的第二部分中使用的方法要么缺乏传输通道的规范，要么受到太过格式化和不能很好地利用微观数据的困扰。通过拟议的项目，我们打算为缩小这些差距作出贡献。在此过程中，我们将首先确定家庭收入的最相关的微观、地方和宏观决定因素，并审查现有的证据，说明它们在审议中的三个国家的分配影响。这种描述性评估用于得出关于分布变化驱动因素的可检验假设。然后，我们将确定一个反映微观层面主要制约因素的农村创收综合模型，以及一个捕捉冲击和政策向家庭层面传导的宏观模型。最后，也是最重要的是，我们将在宏观-微观模拟分析中将这两个模型联系起来，以量化具体国家的主要外部冲击和政策改革对贫困和收入分配的影响。通过揭示决定家庭收入的各种因素的相对强度，模拟分析还将提供可用于得出农村发展政策优先领域的信息。

The proposed research project aims at identifying the major driving forces of rural poverty and distributional change in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Specifically, the analysis will involve case studies for Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Uganda, where micro and local as well as macro determinants of household incomes will be considered. While each case study will reveal interesting results in its own right, the objective is to draw general lessons, i.e. together the case studies should form more than the sum of the parts. The existing literature on the determinants of rural poverty and distributional change can broadly be divided into studies which analyse rural household behaviour in response to changes at the household and local level, and studies which try to establish a link between distributional outcomes and specific macroeconomic shocks or policies. Taken together, these two strands of the literature cover most of the factors that may affect rural households, but the literature appears to be incomplete in several respects. Studies belonging to the first strand tend to focus on specific aspects of rural income generation, thereby failing to account for the interactions between the micro determinants of household income and to trace micro changes back to changes at the macro level. The approaches employed in the second strand of the literature either lack a specification of transmission channels or suffer from being too stylised and not well informed by micro data. With the proposed project we intend to contribute to closing these gaps. In doing so, we will first identify the most relevant micro, local and macro determinants of household incomes and review the available evidence on their distributional impact in the three countries under consideration. This descriptive assessment serves to derive testable hypotheses regarding the drivers of distributional change. We will then specify a comprehensive model of rural income generation that accounts for the major constraints at the micro level, and a macro model that captures the transmission of shocks and policies to the household level. Finally, and most importantly, we will link the two models in a macro-micro simulation analysis in order to quantify the impact of the main country-specific external shocks and policy reforms on poverty and income distribution. By revealing the relative strength of the various factors determining household incomes, the simulation analysis will also provide information that can be used to derive priority areas for rural development policy.