 Does reliable electricity mean lesser agricultural labor wages? Evidence from Indian villagesSuryadeepto Nag Energy Policy, 2024, vol. 190, issue C Abstract: Using a panel of 1,171 villages in rural India that were surveyed in the India Human Development Surveys, I perform a difference-in-differences analysis to find that improvements in electricity reliability have a negative effect on the increase in casual agricultural labor wage rates. Changes in men’s wage rates are found to be affected more adversely than women’s, resulting in a smaller widening of the gender wage gap. I find that better electricity reliability reduces the time spent by women in fuel collection substantially which could potentially increase labor supply. The demand for labor remains unaffected by reliability, which could lead the surplus in labor supply to cause wage rates to stunt. However, I show that electrical appliances such as groundwater pumps considerably increase labor demand indicating that governments could target increasing the adoption of electric pumps along with bettering the quality of electricity to absorb the surplus labor into agriculture. Keywords: Electricity reliability; Labor wages; South Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:190:y:2024:i:c:s030142152400171x DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2024.114151 Access Statistics for this article Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier |
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