Abstract
This paper scrutinized the links between social status and income of rural households to provide insight into how social status is indicated and used as a strategy for improving livelihood income. It also provides a brief look into some selected key determinants of livelihood income. We applied a two-stage least-squares estimation to household-level data from rural areas in the Tigray regional state of Ethiopia. We also proposed the latent class analysis model to identify the number of classes for the variable “social status”. The results indicate that livelihood income is significantly affected by households’ social status, indicating that high status household heads tend to enhance their participation in different social networks with the intention of strengthening the social bonds that they have and improving their status in the community, which in turn has an economic payback. Apart from this, household heads’ access to off-farm work, size of owned land, exposure to multimedia, livestock ownership and spatial proximity to towns were the variables that have significant positive effects on livelihood income.
Highlights
Social status is viewed as the degree of honor or prestige attached to one’s position in a society [1,2]
This strategy provides us with an opportunity to generate the variable social status in a way that is mainly related to participation in social networks and model its effect that it has on livelihood income from a spatial perspective
Focusing on the significant variables, the obtained findings corroborate that rural households’ social status, instrumented by degree of participation in social networks, has a significantly positive effect on livelihood income. This implies that high status households have significantly higher income than low status ones. This scenario is the reality in the case area of this study, where high status rural household heads are highly capable of influencing rural market dealings and various social activities of their hinterlands, which enable them to use this as a base to claim a relatively higher income
Summary
Social status is viewed as the degree of honor or prestige attached to one’s position in a society [1,2]. The different aspects of the effects of status on the livelihoods of rural people are critical in addressing recent endeavors of rural economic development. The main purpose of the focus group discussion was to provide detailed empirical background information about the households in the study hinterlands and to clear up few key points about the quantitative investigation. This part of the paper presents the background information collected through the focus group discussion and provides some stories from the households
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