Living Standards Measurements Study - Serbia 2002 - 2007

1.10. Land ownership
Land ownership has not served as a protection
from poverty for a number of households in
rural areas, yet, households with large farms were
prone to significantly lower poverty risk.
Households in rural areas that do not own land or
have small holdings (smaller than 1 hectare) are
faced with the highest poverty risk (around 13
percent). These two groups accounted for 71
percent of the poor in 2007 (Table 15). The risk
then declines with the size of land holdings.
Households with holdings exceeding 1 hectare
faced a below-average poverty risk, and the lowest
poverty risk pertained to those households with
holdings larger than 3 hectares. In the 2002-2007
period, poverty declined the most in such
households which had 1 - 3 hectare holdings. The
average holding size in rural areas was approximately
2.3 hectares.
In addition to small-sized and fragmented
holding with the average of 7 plots per holding, there
are numerous restrictions in terms of the agricultural
sector productivity growth, and consequently for the
growth of agricultural revenues in rural areas, which
could protect the population in rural areas from
poverty, such as: obsolete agricultural equipment
(average age of some 20 years), a lack of irrigation
systems, difficult access to financing, undeveloped
infrastructure, etc. According to the opinion of small
rural households, key restrictions of their
development consist of the following: nonagricultural
employment opportunities, increased
access to loans and better organized market (the
Government of the Republic of Serbia, 2007).
1.11. Consumption determinants
The poverty profile presented in the previous
part describes the categories of population which
were most exposed to poverty. For instance, it may
be a person with a low education level who lives in
a rural area, and has a poorly paid seasonal job in
the agricultural sector. In order to assess the net
effect any of the aforementioned features
(education, location, labour market status and the
like) upon poverty, i.e. on the population
consumption, regression analysis is used.
Therefore, this part will analyze the factors
affecting the living standard and poverty, the
identification of which may be ex-tremely useful in
managing the economic and social policy aimed at
reducing poverty and preventing the emergence of
new poverty. This analysis reveals the povertyrelated
factors without uncovering cause-and-effect
relations. The factors being analyzed are the same
ones as those which were the subject of analysis in
the poverty profile, such as: household features
(age structure, size, location, ownership and size of
arable land) and the features of household heads
(gender, age, education and labour market status).
These factors are used as independent variables in a
simple linear regression, where the dependent
variable is the consumption per adult equivalent.
Separate regression analysis of urban and rural
areas has been undertaken and the results are
presented in Table 16.
Table 1.15. Poverty by land size in rural areas, 2002-2007
Percentage of the poor
Structure of the poor, Structure of overall population,
percent
percent
2002 2007 Change 2002 2007 Change 2002 2007 Change
0 ha 20.1 13.2 -6.8 41.9 48.3 6.4 36.2 35.6 -0.6