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.