Analysis of Poverty Status and Income Distribution Among Farming Households In Imo State, Nigeria

Abstract

Incidence of poverty among Nigerians kept on growing in spite of all the laudable programmes and interventions that have been put in place by the governmental and non-governmental agencies to alleviate poverty in the country. It was against this background that this study takes the initiative of analysing poverty status and income distribution among farm households in Imo State. Hence, the study made use of questionnaire to gather data from the households. Findings revealed that the mean households’ size is 7 persons which are large enough to attract high dependency burden, the mean age of the respondents is 58 years, most (91.70%) of the respondents had formal education. The result further showed Gini coefficient of 0.19, indicating a low level of inequality in income distribution which suggested homogenous population of the farm households. Theil T (26.7%) of the total inequality is contributed by the overall income while Theil L which measures the mean log deviation indicated 30% of total inequality was contributed by total income. In essence, other factors apart from income contribute more to total income inequality. Decomposing the Gini coefficient, the contribution of agriculture to total inequality was highest (3.271) while secondary economic activities contributed the least in negative effect. It is good to note that agricultural income is highly unequally distributed. Therefore, secondary economic activities which have greater potential impact on income distribution should be encouraged.

Keywords: Incidence of poverty, income distribution, income decomposition, primary income,  primary occupation.