Employment Patterns and Income Formation in Rural Bangladesh: The Role of Rural Non-farm Sector

Wahiduddin Mahmud
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Wahiduddin Mahmud: Professor of Economics, Dhaka University, Bangladesh

Bangladesh Development Studies, 1996, vol. 24, issue 3-4, 1-27

Abstract: The rural non-farm (RNF) sector in Bangladesh provides employment to a large and growing proportion of the country's labour force. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that the process of labour shift from agriculture to the RNF sector represents a precarious balance of the "push-versus-pull" factors that might have kept rural poverty situation from deteriorating, without making much improvement in the situation either. The expansion of low-productivity self-employment has been the major contributing factor in the sectoral transformation of the rural labour force. While the provision of such non-farm employment has been crucial for absorbing the growing numbers of landless rural workers, the labour shift may have created some degree of overcrowding in the low-productivity non-farm activities, thus undermining the growth of overall productivity and income levels in the RNF sector. In future, if the RNF sector is to play a more dynamic role, there will have to be probably some shift of emphasis towards relatively larger-scale and higher-productivity RNF activities which are better able to respond to income-elastic market demand.

Keywords: Employment; Population estimates; Agriculture; Censuses; Rural areas; Income distribution; Agricultural population; Agricultural labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:badest:0360

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