EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Non‐economic Bases of Economic Behaviour: The Consumption, Investment and Exchange Patterns of Three Emigrant Communities in Kerala, India

Prema Ann Kurien

Development and Change, 1994, vol. 25, issue 4, 757-783

Abstract: This article takes issue with the rational choice approach that views the economy as an autonomous realm where isolated individuals make maximizing choices in terms of their personal preferences. The argument made is that income generation, consumption and exchange form a holistic complex that must be studied in its unity and that the economy and individual economic behaviour are articulated with a social context. This is demonstrated by evidence (collected through fieldwork) on the differences in the use of remittances by three villages in Kerala, India, which have experienced large scale migration to the Middle Eastern countries. In the three cases, it was the way in which income earned from international migration was perceived, together with the variation in ethnic structures, that explained the similarities and differences in their consumption, exchange and investment patterns. In each case, it was the larger ethnic structure that conditioned (1) the types of activities into which the money was channelled; (2) the range of people who were the beneficiaries of migrant remittances; (3) the patterns of reciprocity or charity practised by the migrants; (4) the selection of the trade‐off point between community status and economic accumulation; and; (5) the groups of individuals who gained or lost economic control.

Date: 1994
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1994.tb00535.x

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:bla:devchg:v:25:y:1994:i:4:p:757-783

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0012-155X

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Development and Change from International Institute of Social Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:devchg:v:25:y:1994:i:4:p:757-783