Agricultural Households: An Exploratory Analysis Revisiting Financial Position and Well-being in Australia*

Abstract

As the issue of agricultural household economic well-being begins to resurface, we use custom data sets to compare the financial position of agricultural households to the general Australian population. We find that agricultural households tend to have higher levels of wealth compared to households in the average Australian population, yet experience more income volatility on average. Our study brings attention to the important well-being issue while also highlighting the need to collect robust farm household data in order to better understand the complex dynamics of household well-being in the Australian agricultural sector.