Travelling in the social science community: assessing the impact of the Indian Green Revolution across disciplines

Peter Howlett

Economic History Working Papers from London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History

Abstract: The Indian Green Revolution, which began in the late 1960s, offers an exemplary case for studying the nature of evidence and how it travels between academia and the public sphere, between different academic disciplines and over time. Initial assessments of the Green Revolution’s effects were generally positive; yet by the mid-1970s, a more negative view of its impact had come to prominence. By the 1990s this view was, in turn, being displaced by a more optimistic one. The aim of this paper is not to evaluate the impact of the Indian Green Revolution, but rather to examine how the different constituencies of the social science community have communicated with one another on this topic and to examine what facts about it have travelled over time and between the different social science disciplines. By their very nature different social science disciplines are concerned with different aspects of any given issue: an economist might be interested in the impact on output and income over time, whilst a sociologist might be more concerned with the impact new technology has on existing social relations, and a geographer on the use of land and water. Through an in-depth analysis of 76 articles published between 1969 and 2004 in journals covering the range of social science disciplines, this paper shows how (and how well) facts travel between the social sciences.

JEL-codes: B1 O53 Q5 Z10 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2008-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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