Partition, migration, and jute cultivation in India

James Fenske and Prashant Bharadwaj

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Climate change is expected to displace millions of involuntary migrants in Bangladesh. We draw on history to show that these ``environmental refugees'' can play a positive role in the regions that receive them by looking at the partition of India. We use an instrumental variables (IV) strategy to show that the migrants played a major role in India's take-up of jute cultivation. Our estimates suggest that migrants fully explain post-Partition jute cultivation. Consistent with migrants bringing jute-specific skills with them, we find that migrants increased jute yields and did not increase the cultivation of other crops.

Keywords: Jute; Partition; Migration; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N55 O13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/22979/1/MPRA_paper_22979.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24571/1/MPRA_paper_24571.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27996/2/MPRA_paper_27996.pdf revised version (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:pra:mprapa:22979

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().