Common Pool Resources, Rural Poverty and Inequality: A multi-country Study

Our study draws on data from about 6500 households across fifteen regions in nine low and medium-income countries covering Africa, Asia, and Latin America to estimate the contribution of CPR-based income to poverty alleviation and inequality, based on an understanding of how CPR-based income is influenced by household assets, the abundance of CPRs and institutions of resource access. Our analysis confirms that CPR-based income makes up a significant portion of the income of the rural poor. However, elite households, generally derive more monetary benefit from CPRs not only in absolute terms but also in terms of share in household income, not because of differential access to the resource but because of their differential access to complementary productive assets and the capital-intensive nature of most technologies required for increasing returns from CPRs through markets. CPRs reduce inequality only when their use is for subsistence purposes using labour-intensive methods. For this study we created a multi-country household-level dataset on household demography, income, resource tenure by pooling data from a number of existing livelihood-environment studies under Nature4SDGs project (https://www.nature4sdgs.org/). We also collated several global datasets to generate information on the social-ecological context of each settlement as close to the time period covering original data collection as possible (i.e., 2011–2015). We have used secondary data for variables such as market access, population density and resource abundance. Using these data , we created a data file named Processed_data_for_analysis.dta in STATA for analysing our research questions. Please refer to the README file for better understanding of the data.本研究采用覆盖非洲、亚洲及拉丁美洲9个中低收入国家15个地区的约6500户家庭数据，在厘清共同财产资源（Common Property Resources, CPR）相关收入受家庭资产禀赋、CPR丰度与资源获取制度影响机制的基础上，估算该类收入对减贫与收入不平等的贡献作用。本研究分析证实，共同财产资源相关收入在农村贫困人口的总收入中占据显著比重。然而，精英家庭通常从共同财产资源中获取的经济收益无论在绝对规模还是家庭收入占比上均更高——这并非源于其在资源获取渠道上的差异，而是得益于其拥有更充足的互补性生产资产，以及多数依托市场提升共同财产资源收益所需技术的资本密集属性。仅当以劳动密集型方式将共同财产资源用于自给自足用途时，其方可缓解收入不平等。本研究通过整合Nature4SDGs项目（https://www.nature4sdgs.org/）旗下多项现有生计-环境研究的数据，构建了涵盖家庭人口结构、收入状况与资源持有权的多国家庭级数据集。此外，本研究还整合多套全球数据集，以尽可能匹配原始数据采集时段（即2011-2015年）生成各居民点的社会生态背景信息。针对市场可达性、人口密度与资源丰度等变量，本研究采用二手数据。基于上述数据，我们使用STATA软件生成了名为Processed_data_for_analysis.dta的分析数据集，用于解答本研究的核心问题。如需深入了解本数据集的详细信息，请参阅README文件。