Determinants of income diversification in Tea estates households in Badulla district
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Date
2015
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
Tea is the main foreign exchange owner in Sri Lanka. It shows that Tea industry is playing major role
in national economy. Estate laborers are one of the major players in tea industry. Tea industry
economically depends on sweat and blood of estate workers (Muthulingam, 2010). In initial stage of
tea industry, laborers who were working in tea industry had estate income as sole income source. If
it was sole way of income, the labor wage was very low. They had not enough facilities to engage
with other agricultural and non-agricultural like income activities. Also management of tea estates
was provided facilities to estate households to work only in estates. To improve the estate workers
living condition, there is an alternative way called as an income diversification. Income
diversification has talked world widely with various sectors. But, no any research has carried out on
income diversification in tea estate households. Therefore, study of this matter is most important to
the tea estate sector. In this study the income diversification and pattern of income diversification of
tea estates households are considered in Badulla district.
Materials and Methodology
The Survey was conducted in Badulla district by using 298 tea estates households. Censored Tobit
regression analysis method was used to examine the determinants of income diversification. In many
research on income diversification have used censored Tobit model to find out determinants of the
income diversification. In this research dependent variables are including value zero to high amount
of value. Therefore for Tobit model is used for data analying. (Schwarz and Zeller, 2005). In this
study three dependent variables are taken as estate income, other agricultural income and non-
agricultural Income. Nine variables are used as explanatory variable. Those are age of household
head, gender of household head, number of dependents in a family, number of male, number of
female, monthly expenditure, distance to the city, years of schooling household head and loan receipt.
Description
Keywords
Agriculture, Export Agriculture, Income, Tea Industrials, Tea Technology