Casual agricultural labor is widely considered to be a vocation of last resort for those who have no other means of supporting themselves. Yet, this group constitutes 30 percent of all rural households (nearly two-thirds of who live in absolute poverty) and accounts for about 60 per cent of total unemployed person-days in India. The importance of economic outcomes in agricultural labor markets for the problem of poverty and unemployment is thus obvious. However, there remain substantial gaps in our understanding of the key processes of wage and employment determination which govern the fate of this stratum, one of the most deprived groups in the country. This study offers a new perspective on the analysis of agricultural labor markets in India. While it is well-known that rural labor markets are typically unorganised, Dr Datt argues that the existence of various forms of quasi-cooperative behaviour (which often characterize village-level labor markets) points to the relevance of a tacit collective bargaining framework for analysing market outcomes.

The author develops a new bargaining model of the casual labor market at the village level. The model determines the wage rate, the level of employment and the employers’ profits, and is consistent with the key stylized features of agricultural labor markets, including the coexistence of wage variability and unemployment. Of particular interest is the author’s emphasis on incorporating gender disparity in the bargaining process to explain the persistence of a gender wage gap.

Empirical estimates of the model based on longitudinal data for ten villages in five different agro-climatic zones in India provide evidence of significant inequality in the relative bargaining powers of employers and laborers. The results also show that such asymmetric power exerts a significant quantitative influence on distributional outcomes in the village economy.

Overall, this methodological study not only provides a rich analysis of the operation of agricultural labor markets, but also develops a new agenda for research on this subject from a hitherto neglected perspective. The book will be of interest to all those concerned with labor studies, agricultural economics, economic theory, and development economics.

Citation: Datt G. 1996. Bargaining power, wages and employment. An analysis of agricultural labor markets in India, New Delhi, India: Sage Publication.

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This book has been a long time in coming. The hypotheses that guided much of the empirical research were framed in 1974. Data collection started in 1975. But the origin of the book really dates to 1972 when the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics(ICRISAT) was founded in Hyderabad, India. ICRISAT was the first new centre formally created in the emerging international agricultural research system. Its establishment reflected the importance in population and geographic area of rain-fed farming and the semi- arid tropics in world agriculture. Semi-arid tropical regions are often characterized by scanty and uncertain rainfall, on which agricultural production largely depends, infertile soils, poor infrastructure, extreme poverty, rapid population growth, and high risks. That characterization of neglect also applied to social science research in the semi-arid tropics in the early 1970’s. While India was well endowed with survey information and secondary data, much of it was aggregative, partial, cross-sectional and concentrated on non- SAT regions. A consistent household time series data base on a representative cross section of SAT villages was lacking. Such benchmark households and villages could be used by scientists at ICRISAT and cooperating Indian and overseas research institutions to enhance understanding of development in the Indian SAT and to test hypotheses relevant to the design of technology and policies for the improvement of economic well being.

With those purposes in mind, longitudinal village studies were initiated in three important and contrasting production regions in India’s semi-arid tropics in the mid – 1970s. This book is largely about what we learned from those studies. In the early 1980s, the approach was extended to two other regions in India’s SAT and to three regions in West Africa’s SAT.

Because the SAT has not received much attention in the development literature, we felt it was important to document the microeconomic features of India’s SAT which are common to other regions and the more numerous ones which are unique to it. We begin at the microscopic level of individuals and fields, aggregate to socioeconomic groups and villages, and ultimately move to regional contrasts.

Designing research and development strategies in the predominantly rain-fed SAT is not an easy task. It is our hope that the book will heighten the awareness of national policy makers and the international community of both the challenges and opportunities facing the hundreds of million people in SAT India. If it does not, this neglected region may neither realize its full potential nor participate in the gains from national economic growth.

Citation:Walker TS and Ryan JG. 1990. Village and household economies in India's semi-arid tropics. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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