Agricultural Growth and Poverty Incidence Among Agriculture Dependent Rural Households

Changes and Continuities

Abstract

In Uruguay, it is widespread the conception that the period of economic growth has allowed a decrease in poverty in general, and a decrease particularly in poverty in rural areas, that would have reached the lowest levels in several years. This paper focuses on rural and agricultural dependent households, deepening the analysis of the relationship between the aggregate economic performance of the primary sector and the incidence of poverty in rural areas. The analysis is based on secondary data sources: on one hand, on the Gross Domestic Product series reported by the System of National Accounts (SCN ) for the 1997-2009 period, and then on the available Household Survey (EH) for the 2000-2009 period. The overall objective of the paper is to analyze the changes in terms of economic growth in both contexts for studying the evolution of the incidence of poverty among rural households. The main conclusions are: 1. there have been no changes in the relative share of households with farm income between 2000 and 2009, 2. the incidence of poverty varies among different types of households, 3. although agriculture dependent rural households are worse off relatively, they were the most resilient the period 2000-2006, in which there was a sharp increase in poverty.