Contribution of Crop Income in Reducing Poverty & Inequality in Punjab

Crop income is an important component of total income, among rural households in Pakistan and most of the share in agricultural growth is contributed from this sector. At the same time poverty alleviation is one of the key challenges in many developing economies like Pakistan. From a policy point of view, it becomes important to understand the relative importance of crop income in driving inter-household inequality and poverty. A number of studies in recent years have tried to show the relationship of different sources of income, income inequality and poverty in different countries but in Pakistan very little work has been done broadly. Therefore, this study contributes in the poverty and income inequality research by decomposing the crop income, to find out the contribution of different sources of income in crop income and income inequality across different farm sizes in two agro-climatic zones. This analysis is done by making a fine comparison between two agro climatic zones, because of the variability in percentage share of different sources of income in crop income and their poverty levels.