Covariate Shocks and Rural Poverty in Burkina Faso

The civil war in Côte d’Ivoire has caused an increase in household size due to returnees and a decrease in remittance received in rural Burkina Faso. This paper, taking advantage of a rare dataset covering the covariate shocks caused by the Ivorian Crisis, examines empirically the impact of such shocks on households’ welfare in rural Burkina Faso. It is found that the number of working-age returnees increases household cropped area: one working-age returnees increase 0.64 ha of cropped area and that the decrease of remittance from Côte d’Ivoire increases non-agricultural income: 1 FCFA reduction of remittance increases 0.78 FCFA of non-agricultural income. In spite of those coping behaviors, this paper demonstrates that the households do not fully smooth consumption against the reduction of remittance form Côte d’Ivoire. The impact is much larger for the asset-poor households than the asset-rich household, as expected. Female human capital, on the other hand, is found to enhance household expenditure per capita. Two-stage regression with non-agricultural income variable confirms the role of non-agricultural income in the reduction of poverty.