Role of political connections in land investment: evidence from rural India

Malik Altaf Hussain () and Malvika Tyagi ()
Additional contact information
Malik Altaf Hussain: Jawaharlal Nehru University
Malvika Tyagi: The London School of Economics

Constitutional Political Economy, 2020, vol. 31, issue 3, No 4, 344-362

Abstract: Abstract Decentralization in India was implemented as a remedy for the ineffectiveness of government schemes in reaching and benefitting the poor and the necessity of involvement and participation of the very citizenry at the grassroots that are most in need of government intervention and support. However, if this participation itself tends to be dominated by the elite, or prone to corruption, and therefore exclusionary, it becomes a case of the remedy being as bad, if not worse than the malaise. It is in light of the above that this paper attempts a two-part analysis of the IHDS-I and II (India Human Development Survey, first and Second Round) data pertaining to Indian Rural Households, wherein the first part, we examine whether their political connections or lack thereof determine the investment in land by these households. Upon finding that this is indeed the case, the second part is devoted to probing into the significance of possible links that may drive such a positive relationship. Our results show that access to financing instruments of investment by a rural household is indeed more probable in the case of a politically connected household vis-à-vis one lacking such connections.

Keywords: Political connections; Corruption; Land investment; Decentralization; Panchayats (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 O10 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-019-09293-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:copoec:v:31:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s10602-019-09293-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-019-09293-3

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().