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Rural settlement in previously sparsely occupied areas of the Brazilian Amazon has been associated with high levels of forest loss and unclear long-term social outcomes. We focus here on the micro-level processes in one settlement area to answer the question of how settler and farm endowments affect household poverty. We analyze the extent to which poverty is sensitive to changes in natural capital, land use strategies, and biophysical characteristics of properties (particularly soil quality). Cumulative time spent in poverty is simulated using Markovian processes, which show that accessibility to markets and land use system are especially important for decreasing poverty among households in our sample. Wealtheir households are selected into commercial production of perennials before our initial observation, and are therefore in poverty a lower proportion of the time. Land in pasture, in contrast, has an independent effect on reducing the proportion of time spent in poverty. Taken together, these results show that investments in roads and the institutional structures needed to make commercial agriculture or ranching viable in existing and new settlement areas can improve human well-being in frontiers.

Much has been discussed in the international literature about the relationship between family arrangements and migration decision-making, although few studies have done so through the analysis of quantitative data from migrants' countries of origin. Based on the theoretical contributions brought by the New Economics of Labor Migration and Transnationalism, we investigate how three intervening factors affect household living arrangements in the migrant's country of origin: people's life-cycle stages, migration regimes, and family normative systems. Using as case study the municipality of Governador Valadares, Brazil, the country's main international emigration hotspot, we draw on a mixed-methods approach that includes the analysis of the Brazilian Census and novel survey data, in addition to 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with migrants' relatives and returnees. The results point to clear differences between the structure of households with and without international emigrants. The reasons for these differences may be two-fold: (a) international emigration is an important factor leading to the rearrangement of family care systems, and (b) migration decision-making processes are dependent upon particular household structures, family norms and migration regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]