significant effect for the non-poor. This could be explained by the reduction of
discriminatory practices based on gender for the non-poor female heads as compared to
their poor counterparts. The proportion of adults working off the farm, which could be an
indication of the availability of employment opportunities in the area, shows the same
pattern: a clear positive effect for the poor but not as clearly for the non-poor. This is not
surprising given that the poor are more likely to benefit from other income earning
activities and is further an indication of the role of access to the off-farm labor market in
breaking the cycle of poverty, a subject well advanced by Giles (2006).
A similar pattern is observed for the number of months the head stayed home.
The higher the number of months the head was at home, the lower the impact on income
growth, which again implies that working away from the farm for the head, resulted in
positive income gains for the poor. This may indicate the role of migratory labor in rural
income growth. The number of livestock owned had positive income gains for both the
poor and non-poor but the amount of land cultivated had no significant influence on
either. This latter result is surprising given that we observe a general increase in land
cultivated with income, but seems consistent with findings from Burke et al. (2007). It is
however possible (as may be the case with a few other variables) that the low variability
of these variables across the years, which is only made worse by the differencing
operation, may cause an insignificant result in an otherwise significant variable.
Considering the pattern of income growth by agricultural potential (Table 4), we
observe strong evidence of income persistence for those households in the lower
agricultural potential areas and whose heads had no college training. This persistence is
however broken for households with post secondary training (as indicated by the
20