| Households from the rural areas of developing countries often lack many markets of interest, leading them often to tradeoff their long-run wellbeing for short-run survival priorities. Such situations create pressures on the limited volumes of natural resources available to them, on which they thrive for their income and livelihood. Moreover, frequent occurrences of extreme events, such as natural and political disasters, add to their overwhelming woes. Papers 1, 2 and 3 of this research broadly address land, disasters and fishery related issues, respectively. First paper identifies how tenure security and subsistence needs influence the tradeoff between unexploited topsoil and unspent money (i.e., savings) as the mode of intergenerational transfer. In an overlapping generation framework, I find that the current generation substitutes agricultural labor for topsoil conservation efforts under greater tenure security; and, consequently, switches from unspent money to topsoil as its mode of transfer. However, subsistence needs have opposite and offsetting impacts. Thus, simultaneous changes in tenure security and subsistence needs offset the impacts of each other on the allocation of labor, and the mode of transfer. Second paper uses childhood exposure to the series of 1970-1974 disasters in Bangladesh as a natural experiment inducing variations in the adulthood health, schooling and consumption outcomes. I find mixed evidence of such adulthood adversities by regions and cohorts. However, adversities are accentuated among the females, poor, and individuals with uneducated parents. I infer that instead of the childhood exposure to a disaster, differences in gender, poverty and parental schooling statuses are responsible for most of the variations in health, schooling and consumption outcomes. Finally, third paper uses a unique survey dataset from Malaysia to identify the effects of schooling and family size on the choice between wage employment and endogenously determined remittances as the source to supplement fishing income. I find that secondary schooling lowers remittances and increases outside income; whereas, family size increases remittances and reduces outside income. From a policy perspective, I infer that any policy intervention targeting the development of non-fishing employment sectors must focus on the development of education and family characteristics in the targeted community. |
