Economics of the familiy-households in marginal zones of Jordan.

Publikations-Art

Kongressbeitrag

Autoren

Al-Baqain, R.

Erscheinungsjahr

1999

Veröffentlicht in

Proceedings of The International Symposium of AFSRE

Herausgeber

Doppler, W. und Koutsouris, A.

Verlag

Margraf Verlag , Weikersheim

ISBN / ISSN / eISSN

3-8236-1320-0

Seite (von - bis)

330-336

Tagungsname

Third European Symposium on Rural and Farming Sytems Analyses: Environmental Perspectives

Tagungsort

Hohenheim

Tagungsdatum

25.-27.3.1998

Recently, household economy has started to gain more attention after a long period of overlooking in developing countries. The consolidation of the rural development process, as a main objective in farming system development, should focus on the role of the household economy in improving the living standard of the farm families. This paper tries to investigate the priorities that the families in the marginal zone of Jordan considered in spending their income. Also, the paper tries to examine the factors that influence the amount of household expenditure. For the latter objective a multiple linear regression model, through making use of a dummy variable, has been applied. It has been found that more than half of the family cash outflow is located under household expenditures. Expenses on food from the market, social occasions and education, comprise more than two thirds of the total household expenditure. The value of food from own production consumed by the family comprises about 40% of the total annual food consumption. In fact this was not the case 10-20 years ago when own production was the main source of food. The change reflects a transition in the development process of farming systems in the marginal zone of Jordan. The empirical results indicate that values of capital owned by the farmer, reflecting his wealth and status within the local community, as well as off-farm incomes have the highest significant influence on how much the family spends. Likewise, the results suggest that less educated and older farmers with large family size have a positive influence on household expenses at a significant level of 2.5%-5%.