Suchergebnisse

There has been much debate over the extent to which economic
growth reduces poverty and augments human development among the poor.
This paper describes ongoing research using survey data on the Green
Revolution experience in India that focuses on this issue. The research
is based on a general-equilibrium model of labour markets for adults and
children that differentiates households by whether they own land and
incorporates a public sector that chooses the amount of school building.
The empirical results suggest, consistent with the model, that
expectations of improvements in agricultural productivity increase the
schooling of children in landed households and reduce schooling in
landless households, in part because of the operation of the child
labour market, as landless child labour is used to replace landed child
labour lost due to increased child school attendance in landed
households. The results also show, however, that school construction in
India was undertaken at higher levels in areas in which there were
expectations of greater future productivity increases, and that the
closer proximity of schools differentially benefited landless
households. Thus school building policy in India tended to offset the
adverse distributional consequences of agricultural technological change
in the early stages of the Green Revolution. The allocation of schools,
however, did not fully offset the incentives for landless households to
reduce schooling investments. The perverse correlation between human
development and income growth observed among the poor landless
households in India at the initial stages of the Green Revolution, thus,
was not due to lack of responsiveness of public resources but to the
lack of a return to schooling in the non-farm sector.