Rigidities restraining movement of a rural artisan from poor to non‐poor state

Abstract

Purpose – The concept of poverty traps based on a critical threshold that distinguishes transitory from chronic poverty gives rise to a crucial policy distinction between cargo nets and safety nets. While safety nets are designed to prevent the non‐poor and transitorily poor from falling into chronic poverty, cargo nets are meant to help those who fall below the critical threshold to help them climb out of chronic poverty. The study attempts to determine the factors that affect a beneficiary artisan's decision to use the toolkits provided, i.e. to climb up using the cargo net of improved toolkits and become more active economically.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on primary data collected from the supply of improved toolkits to rural artisans (SITRA) programme in 2001‐2002. It is performed on the dataset consisting of 6,788 observations (beneficiary artisans). Due to some missing data 700 observations could not be used. Thus, only 6,088 observations are considered for the purpose of the o...