People, Land, and Context: Multilevel Determinants of Off-Farm Employment in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Alisson F. Barbieri, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

This paper investigates factors affecting decisions of settler colonists to engage in off-farm employment (OFE) in rural or urban areas in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (NEA). While OFE decisions are ultimately a matter of individual choice, factors associated with the farm household and the local community also play key roles in this decision-making. Little empirical research, however, has been done on the simultaneous identification of such factors and their effects on labor mobility, and consequently on deforestation and urbanization in frontier areas. This research develops a multilevel conceptual framework and uses a multinomial, multilevel statistical model to study OFE in the NEA in 1999 as a result of factors at the individual, farm household, and community levels. The results show differences between movers and nonmovers in personal characteristics, human capital, farm household life cycle, land use, land management, farm environmental conditions, transportation accessibility, community size, and structure of local labor markets.