Livestock Production, Rural Poverty, and Perceived Shocks: Evidence from Panel Data for Vietnam

Abstract

This paper assesses the contribution of livestock to reducing rural poverty and examines the determinants of livestock assets with panel data from Vietnam. The findings show that livestock production contributes to reducing poverty and livestock assets are influenced by the number of shocks that households faced during the last three years, access to credits, farmland size, education of household head, irrigation system, and access to the national electricity. We suggest that empowering rural households to better cope with shocks contributes to developing livestock and consequently to reducing rural poverty.

Acknowledgements

We thank the farmers of the surveyed provinces for their support and cooperation. We acknowledge the financial support of the German Research Foundation and appreciate the efforts of our colleagues at the Leibniz University Hannover for data collection. We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions to improve the paper.

We are committed to providing our data and Stata codes upon request, provided that the terms of use are accepted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See http://www.vulnerability-asia.uni-hannover.de/.

2. Both village and household questionnaires can be downloaded at https://www.vulnerability-asia.uni-hannover.de/8471.html.

3. PPP: Purchasing Power Parity in 2005.

4. Tropical Livestock Unit (TLU): measure to convert different types of livestock into one standardised unit applied to South East Asia (Chilonda & Otte, 2006; FAO, 2005). http://lrrd.cipav.org.co/lrrd18/8/chil18117.htm.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) [DFG FOR 756].