Agricultural Growth, Landlessness, Off-Farm Employment, and Rural Poverty in the Philippines

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Abstract
Rapid agricultural growth has been suggested as an alternative development strategy for less-developed countries. The paper shows that rapid agricultural growth, as demonstrated by the Philippine experience in the 1960s and 1970s, is not enough to pull the rural poor out of poverty. Economic structures and the economic policy environment must likewise have to be conducive to a rapid growth of productive employment opportunities, particularly in the nonagricultural sector, for the fast growing labor force. The paper also provides a consistent set of poverty estimates which are used to reinterpret (or question) a number of commonplace claims in the Philippine development literature concerning the association between economic growth, income distribution, and poverty as well as the characteristics of the rural poor.

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