The Labor/Land Ratio and India’s Caste System

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

No 137, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and 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
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.wm.edu/wp/cwm_wp137.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cwm:wpaper:137

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daifeng He ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ) and Alfredo Pereira ().