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（SSA）农村贫困和分配变化的主要驱动力。具体而言，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地方以及宏观决定因素。虽然每个案例研究本身都会揭示有趣的结果，但其目标是吸取一般性的教训，即案例研究合在一起应该比各部分的总和更重要。关于农村贫困和分配变化决定因素的现有文献大致可以分为分析农村家庭行为对家庭和地方层面变化的反应的研究，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。这两类文献加在一起涵盖了可能影响农村家庭的大多数因素，但文献在几个方面似乎不完整。属于第一类的研究往往侧重于农村创收的具体方面，因而未能说明家庭收入的微观决定因素之间的相互作用，也未能将微观变化追溯到宏观一级的变化。第二股文献中采用的方法要么缺乏传输渠道的规范，要么过于程式化，没有很好地了解微观数据。通过拟议的项目，我们打算为缩小这些差距作出贡献。在这样做时，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，并审查其在所考虑的三个国家的分配影响的现有证据。这种描述性评估有助于得出关于分布变化驱动因素的可检验假设。然后，我们将详细说明一个全面的农村创收模型，说明在微观层面的主要制约因素，以及一个宏观模型，捕捉冲击和政策的家庭层面的传输。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，以便量化主要的针对具体国家的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确定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.