Agricultural Growth, Employment and Poverty: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations with Indian data (1970-1993)

D.P. Chaudhri and E.J. Wilson ()
Additional contact information
E.J. Wilson: University of Wollongong, http://business.uow.edu.au/econ/who/index.html

Economics Working Papers from School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Abstract: There is a rapidly growing literature on the dual concern of promoting agricultural growth and reducing the incidence of rural poverty. However the analysis of the interaction of growth and poverty is an under researched area of economic policy. This paper attempts to further analyse these dual concerns in an integrated manner. A basic endogenous growth model is developed which explicitly includes poor households and a government that has to decide how to allocate resources to the provision of infrastructure and to the public distribution of food grains. The intertemporal maximisation clearly shows the trade-off the government is facing and the indeterminate outcome. The model derives five key relationships: an agricultural metaproduction function (which allows differing temporal and spatial technical progress), rural employment and wage functions, and relationships for the public distribution of food grains and for rural poverty. These structural equations are estimated in a simultaneous setting for fifteen Indian states using eleven years of data for the period 1970 to 1993. Care is taken in the treatment of missing values, the non-stationarity of many of the state variables, the high level of dependencies between the variables (in the form of extreme multicollinearity and endogeneity) and the presence of structural change. We believe that insufficient care has been taken with these important complications in some studies. Robust structural form, net average elasticities and reduced form impact elasticity multipliers are derived. These estimates give valuable insights into the complicated interdependencies of the policy and endogenous variables. Whilst our broad conclusions tend to reinforce the findings of recent studies there are major differences in our estimates and methodology, which includes the conceptualisation, analytic specification and application of appropriate estimation techniques.

Keywords: Agricultural growth; poverty; public food distribution; rural and social infrastructure; net average elasticities; impact elasticity multipliers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O30 O32 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2000
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@ ... ts/doc/uow012098.pdf (application/pdf)

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:uow:depec1:wp00-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia School of Economics, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Siminski ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).