Insights on Demonetisation from Rural Tamil Nadu: Understanding Social Networks and Social Protection

Isabelle Guérin, Youna Lanos (), Sébastien Michiels (), Christophe Nordman and Govindan Venkatasubramanian ()
Additional contact information
Youna Lanos: IFP - Institut Français de Pondichéry - MEAE - Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, DIAL - Développement, institutions et analyses de long terme
Sébastien Michiels: IFP - Institut Français de Pondichéry - MEAE - Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, DIAL - Développement, institutions et analyses de long terme, CREST-INSEE - Centre de Recherche en Economie et en Statistique - ENSAI - Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Analyse de l'Information [Bruz] - Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI - Groupe des Écoles Nationales d'Économie et Statistique - ENSAE Paris - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique - Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI - Groupe des Écoles Nationales d'Économie et Statistique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - INSEE - Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE)
Govindan Venkatasubramanian: IFP - Institut Français de Pondichéry - MEAE - Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Not only is there still very little evidence for this, but unlike cash, users must bear the costs of digital payments as well (Mader 2016). [...]the immense pool of data that digital payments generate opens the door to new and problematic forms of control (Gabor and Brook 2016). According to various estimates, the Indian economy lost 0.5 points of growth7 as a direct result (Rao and Kotian 2017), but the official statistics cannot capture the negative growth effects on the informal sector (as the official numbers are largely based on formal sector data). Some families started the season without any advances, hoping to receive them a few months later. Since in many cases wage advances are used to pay off past debts, we suspect they had to postpone debt repayment, which may have incurred additional costs. [...]what really seemed to have happened, instead of clear movement towards more formalised economic transactions, has rather been a reinforcement of the informal economy, which is the very thing that allowed actors to temper the violence and harmful consequences of the shock.

Keywords: Sustainable development; Social Networks; Social Protection; India; Tamil Nadu; Informal economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-12-30
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published in Economic and political weekly, 2017

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-01824464

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().