This paper assesses the recent changes in rural employment in the OECD countries, highlighting the growing role of employment in services and, in some cases, manufacturing activity. In many, but not all, rural areas the secular decline in agricultural employment has been more than counterbalanced by growing employment in these other sectors. However, the diversity of employment growth within an...

Although the Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries, two thirds of the land area are still under agricultural use. Major socio-economic changes are however expected for the agricultural sector. The increasing globalisation of economic relations in agriculture and the possible reduction of European price support to farmers are examples of such developments that may affect agr...

This paper analyses the trends and pattern of women’s employment in rural India using unit data from two types of large scale surveys. It shows that while rural women’s employment has grown over the decades, there has not been much improvement in outcomes. Women are still largely concentrated in agriculture as self-employed or casual labour. Women workers face various forms of discrimination, i...

Empirical evidence has shown that off-farm non-agricultural (OFNA) employment offers a major pathway from poverty for rural populations. However, the pattern of participation in these activities is heterogeneous across categories of individuals and poorly understood. We explore the role of spillovers from peers on an individual’s participation in formal and informal OFNA employment using villag...

Article history: Received 7 February 2014 Received in revised form 27 July 2014 Accepted 28 July 2014 Available online 5 August 2014 This paper discusses the issue of informal employment and its effect on the income distribution in China using datasets from the China Urban Labour Surveys of 2005 and 2010. Based on a new definition of informal employment, we estimated the proportion of informal ...

Although agriculture has a major role in economy, in general, and employment opportunities for unemployed population,in particular, limited ability of individuals to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities in agriculture has reduced the share ofagriculture in employment. Therefore, the enhancement of opportunity recognition skills among individuals in the agriculture sector is believed to solve...

Executive Summary This study assesses the contribution of agriculture to Wisconsin's economy. Building on the analysis of Deller (2004), we use data from 2007 in this study. By using 2007 as the year of analysis, we are able to build on the current Census of Agriculture, which provides detailed data for 2007. We also explore changes in aggregate measures of agriculture from 1990 to 2007, and mo...