Wage Labour in Developing Agriculture: Risk, Effort and Economic Development

This is an empirical study of labor supply and demand issues in semi-arid developing agriculture, explicitly accounting for the presence of the production risk that impinges on farm decision making. It further analyses and empirically tests for the interdependence between the production risk that farmers face in the process of self-cultivation and the labor market risk (or uncertainty of finding off-farm work) that they face when operating in the local labor market. The empirical estimation is based on a unique and relatively comprehensive panel data set relating to a sample of rural households operating in the Indian semi-arid tropics. The presence of unemployment in the local labor market is acknowledged by the formulation and estimation of a disequilibrium model of the labor market, supplementing the partial analyses of labor supply and demand. A comparison of the results of the alternative models, partial and simultaneous, allows a more complete analysis of the issues involved.

Booknews

Semi-arid agriculture constitutes a large proportion of agriculture in less developed economies, yet it has been relatively neglected in terms of research. This study, based on a data set drawn from three villages in diverse agroclimatic zones in the Indian semi-arid tropics, examines farm decision-making within a farm household production framework, emphasizing the importance of cross section-time series data sets and a disequilibrium model of the labor market that takes account of the excess supply or excess demand in each of the years of the sample period. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.