Labour and Poverty: Empirical Relationship Using House Data from South Nigeria

In Nigeria, most farming activities rely on family labor. However, rural-urban drift and the movement of young people away from agriculture are making labor increasingly pause. Thus, labor has become a major constraint to expanding the scope of production by small-scale resource poor farmers. This paper provides an empirical relationship between labor and poverty using data from households. Through a multi stage sampling procedure, 150 farming households were selected using questionnaire. Results of Foster, Greer and Thorbecke decomposition show that poverty incidence, depth and severity increase with increase in labor employed in farm operations implying that poverty is directly related to labor. Finding further reveals that the difference in poverty incidence of one of the sub-group (1–50 Vs 50–100) pair is statistically significant at (P < 0.05). Results suggest that the mandays of labor employed significantly affect the poverty incidence of farm households.