Household Livelihood Survey
Also known as: Livelihood survey, Household income survey, Rural livelihoods survey, Income and assets survey
A household livelihood survey is an instrument designed to capture the full portfolio of activities, income sources, assets, and expenditures through which a household secures its living. Rooted in the rural-livelihoods literature associated with Frank Ellis and in global comparative income studies such as the CIFOR Poverty Environment Network, it measures welfare and resilience by mapping the diversity of a household's economic activities — farming, wage labour, self-employment, environmental harvesting, transfers, and remittances — rather than reducing the household to a single income or consumption figure.
Key highlights
- Captures the full diversity of livelihood activities, including off-farm, self-employment, and environmental income that single-source measures miss.
- Values in-kind and subsistence flows, giving a fuller picture of welfare in economies where much consumption never passes through markets.
- Links welfare to its activity structure, enabling analysis of diversification, risk management, and dependence on natural resources.
- Records both income and assets, supporting assessment of productive capacity and resilience rather than current welfare alone.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use a household livelihood survey when the analytical question is about the composition, diversity, and resilience of how households make a living — for example, studying livelihood diversification, the role of environmental or off-farm income, or the design and targeting of rural development programmes. It is preferable to a pure consumption survey when activity structure and income sources are the object of study. It is more demanding than it appears: valuing in-kind and seasonal income is error-prone, recall is difficult, and total-income estimates are typically noisier and harder to compare across surveys than consumption aggregates.
Strengths & limitations
- Captures the full diversity of livelihood activities, including off-farm, self-employment, and environmental income that single-source measures miss.
- Values in-kind and subsistence flows, giving a fuller picture of welfare in economies where much consumption never passes through markets.
- Links welfare to its activity structure, enabling analysis of diversification, risk management, and dependence on natural resources.
- Records both income and assets, supporting assessment of productive capacity and resilience rather than current welfare alone.
- Income, especially from self-employment and agriculture, is irregular and hard to recall, so total-income estimates are noisy and prone to error.
- Valuing in-kind, subsistence, and environmental income at local prices introduces measurement and imputation uncertainty.
- Comprehensive activity modules make the interview long and costly, constraining sample size and frequency.
- Income-based welfare measures are less comparable across surveys than standardised consumption aggregates because of differing module and recall conventions.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
How does a livelihood survey differ from a consumption-based survey such as the LSMS?
A consumption-based survey (like the LSMS) measures welfare primarily through what a household consumes, because consumption is smooth and reliably reported. A livelihood survey instead emphasises the income side — the set of activities and sources that generate the household's living — and the asset base behind them. Livelihood surveys are better for studying diversification and the structure of how people earn a living, but their income estimates are typically noisier and less comparable than a well-built consumption aggregate.
Why is environmental income important to measure?
Forests, rangelands, and wild resources provide food, fuel, fodder, and cash that often go unrecorded in standard surveys. The global Poverty Environment Network analysis (Angelsen et al., 2014) found environmental income contributes on the order of 28 percent of total household income in studied rural communities — comparable to crops — and is especially important for the poorest. Omitting it understates rural welfare and obscures households' dependence on, and incentives to manage, natural resources.
What is livelihood diversification and how is it measured from such a survey?
Diversification is the process by which households construct a portfolio of activities and income sources to raise income and reduce risk. From a livelihood survey it is measured by decomposing total income into shares by source and summarising their spread — for example with the number of distinct income sources or a concentration index such as a Herfindahl or Simpson index applied to income shares. Higher diversification generally signals greater resilience to activity-specific shocks.
Sources
- 1.Ellis, F. (2000). Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN 9780198296966
- 2.Angelsen, A., Jagger, P., Babigumira, R., Belcher, B., Hogarth, N. J., Bauch, S., Börner, J., Smith-Hall, C., & Wunder, S. (2014). Environmental Income and Rural Livelihoods: A Global-Comparative Analysis. World Development, 64(S1), S12–S28.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Household Livelihood Survey. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/development-studies/household-livelihood-survey