Determinants of Poverty in Fiji Island

The individual, household and community characteristics obtained from the 2008/2009 household and income expenditure survey in Fiji island was assessed through empirical multivariate analysis by using OLS regression to understand the degree of correlation between poverty and individual, household and community characteristics. Some independent variables such as education, household size, availability of infrastructure, sex and age as well as marital status of household heads, income source and subsistence farming were employed whilst the dependent variable is the natural logarithm of total per capita consumption of households as dependent variables and also a proxy for poverty, against a set of exogenous variables. Some key results obtained after the regression analysis indicate that high levels and affordable education, improved infrastructure and accessibility in rural areas, supporting subsistence farmers to transform and graduate to semi-commercial and commercial farming, better government programs on welfare payments to single headed households or female headed households and reducing family size in urban areas are some necessary measures to mitigate poverty in Fiji.