Rural Livelihood Diversification Index
A rural livelihood diversification index summarises, in a single number, how spread out a household's income is across different sources and activities — farming, off-farm wage labour, self-employment, remittances, transfers — rather than concentrated in one. Grounded in Frank Ellis's rural livelihoods framework, which defines diversification as the process by which rural households construct an increasingly diverse portfolio of activities to survive and improve their living standards, the index borrows concentration measures such as the Herfindahl and its Simpson complement from ecology and industrial economics. A household relying wholly on one crop scores as undiversified and exposed; one drawing evenly on many sources scores as highly diversified and, often, more resilient.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Ellis, F. (2000). Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. · ISBN 9780198296966
- Ellis, F. (1998). Household strategies and rural livelihood diversification. Journal of Development Studies, 35(1), 1-38. · DOI 10.1080/00220389808422553
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.