The Effect of Street Vending on Household‟s Welfare: (Evidence from Urban Street Venders in Mizan-Aman Towns, SNPPR, Ethiopia)

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of street vending on household welfare evidence from urban street venders in Mizan-Aman towns a sample of 272 street venders. The data generated to meet this objective were collected via semi structured questionnaires. The survey is cross sectional and also descriptive and explanatory research designs were used. This study is applied descriptive statistics and binary logit model to investigate the impact of street vending on urban street venders household poverty status (proxy to welfare) the logistic regression model has as dependent variable the poverty status (poor and non-poor). The explaining variables, age of street vender, gender, educational level, marital status, migration status, household size, year of selling and selling commodity of street vender. The result of the econometric model indicate that being poor are 49.8 percent higher for the street venders who are female as compared to the street venders who are male. The age between 18 to 29 years old are 8.667 times more likely being poor as compared to age below 18 years old. Being poor are 85 times higher for married as compared to single. Being poor are 78.9 percent higher for the street venders who are selling fruits as compared to who are selling vegetables, being poor are 59.5 percent higher for who migrate for new job from other areas as compared to the street venders born in the research area. However, there is no statistically significant evidence as whether the educational level, household size and year of selling in Mizan-Aman towns affects the street vender poverty status. This study recommends that appropriate measures must be taken to carry out agrarian reform as one of the important factors which increase agricultural production and promote the development of rural areas, hence reducing rural urban migration in the town