The Labor/Land Ratio and India’s Caste System

Harriet Duleep ()
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Harriet Duleep: Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy, The College of William and Mary

No 137, Working Papers from Economics Department, William & Mary

Abstract: This paper proposes that India’s caste system and involuntary labor were joint responses by a nonworking landowning class to a low labor/land ratio in which the rules of the caste system supported the institution of involuntary labor. The hypothesis is tested in two ways: longitudinally, with data from ancient religious texts, and cross-sectionally, with twentieth-century statistics on regional population/land ratios linked to anthropological measures of caste-system rigidity. Both the longitudinal and cross-sectional evidence suggest that the labor/land ratio affected the caste system’s development, persistence, and rigidity over time and across regions of India.

Keywords: labor-to-land ratio; population; involuntary labor; immobility; value of life; marginal product of labor; market wage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 J30 J47 N3 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2013-03-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-his
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cwm:wpaper:137

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