IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/egc/wpaper/991.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is There Surplus Labor in Rural India?

Author

Listed:
  • Mark R. Rosenzweig

    (Department of Economics, Yale University)

  • Andrew D. Foster

    (Department of Economics, Brown University)

Abstract

We show empirically using panel data at the plot and farm level and based on a model incorporating supervision costs, risk, credit-market imperfections and scale-economies associated with mechanization that small-scale farming is inefficient in India. Larger farms are more profitable per acre, more mechanized, less constrained in input use after bad shocks, and employ less per-acre labor than small farms. Based on our structural estimates of the effects of farm size on labor use and the distribution of Indian landholdings, we estimate that over 20% of the Indian agricultural labor force is surplus if minimum farm scale is 20 acres.

Suggested Citation

  • Mark R. Rosenzweig & Andrew D. Foster, 2010. "Is There Surplus Labor in Rural India?," Working Papers 991, Economic Growth Center, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:egc:wpaper:991
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.yale.edu/growth_pdf/cdp991.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Rosenzweig, Mark R., 1988. "Labor markets in low-income countries," Handbook of Development Economics, in: Hollis Chenery & T.N. Srinivasan (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 15, pages 713-762, Elsevier.
    2. Amartya K. Sen, 1966. "Peasants and Dualism with or without Surplus Labor," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 74(5), pages 425-425.
    3. Barrett, Christopher B. & Bellemare, Marc F. & Hou, Janet Y., 2010. "Reconsidering Conventional Explanations of the Inverse Productivity-Size Relationship," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 88-97, January.
    4. Rosenzweig, Mark R & Binswanger, Hans P, 1993. "Wealth, Weather Risk and the Composition and Profitability of Agricultural Investments," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 103(416), pages 56-78, January.
    5. Bhalla, Surjit S. & Das, Tirthatanmoy, 2006. "Pre-and Post-Reform: India: A Revised Look at Employment, Wages and Inequality," India Policy Forum, National Council of Applied Economic Research, vol. 2(1), pages 183-254.
    6. Benjamin, Dwayne, 1995. "Can unobserved land quality explain the inverse productivity relationship?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 51-84, February.
    7. Allen, Robert C., 1988. "The growth of labor productivity in early modern English agriculture," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 25(2), pages 117-146, April.
    8. Lamb, Russell L., 2003. "Inverse productivity: land quality, labor markets, and measurement error," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(1), pages 71-95, June.
    9. de Janvry, Alain & Fafchamps, Marcel & Sadoulet, Elisabeth, 1991. "Peasant Household Behaviour with Missing Markets: Some Paradoxes Explained," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 101(409), pages 1400-1417, November.
    10. Juliano J. Assunção & Luis H. B. Braido, 2007. "Testing Household-Specific Explanations for the Inverse Productivity Relationship," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 89(4), pages 980-990.
    11. Peter Lanjouw & Rinku Murgai, 2009. "Poverty decline, agricultural wages, and nonfarm employment in rural India: 1983–2004," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 40(2), pages 243-263, March.
    12. de Janvry, Alain & Fafchamps, M. & Sadoulet, Elisabeth, 1991. "Peasant Household Behavior with Missing Markets: Some Paradoxes Explain," CUDARE Working Papers 198579, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
    13. Assunção, Juliano & Braido, Luis H.B., 2007. "AJAE Appendix: Testing Household-Specific Explanations for the Inverse Productivity Relationship," American Journal of Agricultural Economics APPENDICES, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 89(4), pages 1-8, November.
    14. Bhalla, Surjit S & Roy, Prannoy L, 1988. "Mis-specification in Farm Productivity Analysis: The Role of Land Quality," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 40(1), pages 55-73, March.
    15. Carter, Michael R, 1984. "Identification of the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity: An Empirical Analysis of Peasant Agricultural Production," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 36(1), pages 131-145, March.
    16. Feder, Gershon, 1985. "The relation between farm size and farm productivity : The role of family labor, supervision and credit constraints," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2-3), pages 297-313, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. C. S. C. Sekhar & Namrata Thapa, 2023. "Rural market imperfections in India: Revisiting old debates with new evidence," Development Policy Review, Overseas Development Institute, vol. 41(5), September.
    2. Barrett, Christopher B. & Bellemare, Marc F. & Hou, Janet Y., 2010. "Reconsidering Conventional Explanations of the Inverse Productivity-Size Relationship," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 88-97, January.
    3. Ayala Wineman & Thomas S. Jayne, 2021. "Factor Market Activity and the Inverse Farm Size-Productivity Relationship in Tanzania," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(3), pages 443-464, March.
    4. Steven Helfand & Matthew Taylor, 2018. "The Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity: Refocusing the Debate," Working Papers 201811, University of California at Riverside, Department of Economics.
    5. Holden, Stein T. & Ali, Daniel & Deininger, Klaus & Hilhorst, Thea, 2016. "A Land Tenure Module for LSMS," CLTS Working Papers 1/16, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Centre for Land Tenure Studies, revised 16 Oct 2019.
    6. Helfand, Steven M. & Taylor, Matthew P.H., 2021. "The inverse relationship between farm size and productivity: Refocusing the debate," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    7. Larson,Donald F. & Muraoka,Rie & Otsuka,Keijiro, 2016. "On the central role of small farms in African rural development strategies," Policy Research Working Paper Series 7710, The World Bank.
    8. Omotilewa, Oluwatoba J. & Jayne, T.S. & Muyanga, Milu & Aromolaran, Adebayo B. & Liverpool-Tasie, Lenis Saweda O. & Awokuse, Titus, 2021. "A revisit of farm size and productivity: Empirical evidence from a wide range of farm sizes in Nigeria," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    9. Donald F. Larson & Keijiro Otsuka & Tomoya Matsumoto & Talip Kilic, 2014. "Should African rural development strategies depend on smallholder farms? An exploration of the inverse-productivity hypothesis," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 45(3), pages 355-367, May.
    10. Klasen, Stephan & Reimers, Malte, 2017. "Looking at Pro-Poor Growth from an Agricultural Perspective," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 147-168.
    11. Desiere, Sam & Jolliffe, Dean, 2018. "Land productivity and plot size: Is measurement error driving the inverse relationship?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 84-98.
    12. Bevis, Leah EM. & Barrett, Christopher B., 2020. "Close to the edge: High productivity at plot peripheries and the inverse size-productivity relationship," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    13. C.S.C Sekhar & Namrata Thapa, 2021. "Agricultural Market Imperfections And Farm Profitability In India," IEG Working Papers 440, Institute of Economic Growth.
    14. Ali, Daniel Ayalew & Deininger, Klaus, 2014. "Is there a farm-size productivity relationship in African agriculture ? evidence from Rwanda," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6770, The World Bank.
    15. Deininger, Klaus & Jin, Songqing & Liu, Yanyan & Singh, Sudhir, 2015. "Labor Market Performance and the Farm Size-Productivity Relationship in Rural India," 2015 Conference, August 9-14, 2015, Milan, Italy 212720, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    16. Aragón, Fernando M. & Restuccia, Diego & Rud, Juan Pablo, 2022. "Are small farms really more productive than large farms?," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 106(C).
    17. Fang Xia & Lingling Hou & Songqing Jin & Dongqing Li, 2020. "Land size and productivity in the livestock sector: evidence from pastoral areas in China," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 64(3), pages 867-888, July.
    18. Andrew D. Foster & Mark R. Rosenzweig, 2022. "Are There Too Many Farms in the World? Labor Market Transaction Costs, Machine Capacities, and Optimal Farm Size," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 130(3), pages 636-680.
    19. Abay, Kibrom A. & Abate, Gashaw T. & Barrett, Christopher B. & Bernard, Tanguy, 2019. "Correlated non-classical measurement errors, ‘Second best’ policy inference, and the inverse size-productivity relationship in agriculture," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 171-184.
    20. Gourlay, Sydney & Kilic, Talip & Lobell, David B., 2019. "A new spin on an old debate: Errors in farmer-reported production and their implications for inverse scale - Productivity relationship in Uganda," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    agriculture; India; scale; profits; labor; tractors;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products
    • O16 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance
    • O53 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Asia including Middle East

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:egc:wpaper:991. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Benjamin King (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/egyalus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.