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Summary: This paper assesses degradation of forests managed by local communities (Van Panchayats (VPs)), relative to state protected and open access forests in the Indian state of Uttaranchal. It is based on ground-level ecological measures of forest quality (including canopy cover, biomass, lopping, and regeneration) in forest areas adjoining a random sample of villages, and controls for unobserved village heterogeneity, possible endogeneity of management regimes and cross-forest spillovers. Controlling for these factors, VP forests are found to be 20–30% less lopped, and similar on other dimensions. The lopping differences are greater the longer the forest has been under a VP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate political determinants of land reform implementation in the Indian state of West Bengal. Using a village panel spanning 1974-1998, we do not find evidence supporting the hypothesis that land reforms were positively and monotonically related to control of local governments by a Left Front coalition vis-à-vis the right-centrist Congress party, combined with lack of commitment to policy platforms. Instead, the evidence is consistent with a quasi-Downsian theory stressing the role of opportunism (reelection concerns) and electoral competition.(JEL D72, O13, O17, Q15) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's two most populous countries each made international headlines in 2008, thanks to the Sichuan earthquake and Beijing Olympics, the Mumbai terror attacks, and reports of how the global financial crisis affected the Chinese and Indian economies. However; China and India were also seen in 2008 as making up, together; one of the ongoing development stories of the twenty-first century-and there are good reasons to think this trend will continue throughout 2009. Thanks to years of strikingly high growth rates for India and even higher ones for China, comparisons of the two countries have proliferated. This has resulted in a slew of books and articles, often aimed at investors, that worry over or enthuse about the way the "dragon" and the "elephant" have been upending or bringing new energy into the global economic order. Scholars immersed in the study of Asia often find these publications lacking in depth, but there is no question that economic shifts in the two countries and surging interest in their current trajectories are important. With this in mind, we decided this would be a useful time to revisit a familiar governance issue that has long been associated with joint discussions of China and India: the relationship between democracy and development. We invited economist Pranab Bardhan, author of a forthcoming book on the political economy of India and China titled Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay, to reflect on the subject, concentrating in particular on issues of governance—a topic he has explored in plenary and keynote addresses given everywhere from Montreal to Manchester; Beijing to Bogota, Canberra to Calcutta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the problems of health services in China and India are related to some structural features of the two economies. Some similarities and differences exist across these two countries in terms of political economy, with differential results. Both countries have experienced remarkable economic growth during the past quarter-century, but this has not always translated into improvements in health for the poor. Although China used to have an egalitarian basic public health service, the system has become quite inegalitarian during the past quarter-century, with the disintegration of the communes and adoption of fee-based services under a system of decentralized public finance. India's health system has remained inegalitarian throughout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports data on terms and conditions of share-cropping contracts collected in 1975-6 from 334 randomly chosen villages in four states in India. Among other things, it suggests some evidence of higher crop share for the tenant positively associated with higheryielding varieties of grains and negatively with cost-sharing by the landlord. Unpaid and obligatory service by the tenant for the landlord is quite uncommon; even less common is the phenomenon of a tenant being tied to a particular landlord; The landlord quite often gives production loans to the tenant, shares in costs of seeds, fertilizers, etc., participates in decision-making about the use of these inputs and in general takes a lot of interest in productive investments on the tenant farm, quite contrary to the traditional image of rentier or usurious landlords associated with "semi-feudalism". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the results of a survey which focused on the detailed terms and conditions of agricultural labor contracts in villages West Bengal, India in 1979. It emphasizes the heterogeneity of employer-employee relationships in the villages. The modes of wage payment, intra-village and inter-village variations in wage rates and modes of wage change are discussed. The article then analyzes the employer-employee relationships of attachment and dependence.

This article estimates labor supply functions in peasant agriculture using data collected from rural households in West Bengal, India. The analytical literature on employment, unemployment, and wage determination in poor agrarian economies is large, albeit inconclusive. Empirical work in this area is comparatively scanty. For the most part it relates either to the question of surplus labor in peasant agriculture or to that of labor use and productivity in studies of production functions fitted to farm management data.

In much of the theoretical literature on development the standard assumption is that of a constant wage in agriculture. In this paper we cite some evidence, obtained in our detailed analysis of a recent large-scale survey of rural labor households by the National Sample Survey in India, of how the existing theories of wage determination by biological or institutional factors leave much to be explained in terms of the observed data. We then proceed to construct a modified theoretical framework which generates comparative-static hypotheses which seem to be consistent with many of the stylized facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of chemical-biological breakthroughs in agricultural technology in recent years in large areas of the poor countries in the world have been picturesquely, if somewhat inappropriately, described as the green revolution. The use of high yielding varieties of seeds together with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other new inputs has dramatically changed the trend and pattern of agricultural production in some of these areas and this in turn is bound to have wide-ranging social and economic effects. The prevailing views on the impact of the green revolution, however, take two divergent lines. One is to emphasize that the new technology breaks the vicious circle of centuries-old stagnation in traditional agriculture and catapults it into the era of modern, efficient, prosperous capitalist agriculture, with even the poor farmers and landless laborers gaining absolutely because the cake to be shared is so much larger now. The other view is to focus on the forces, generated by the green revolution, which tend to accentuate the existing enormous inequality in the economic system those who believe in a strong correlation between increasing inequality and growing discontent and agrarian tensions see here germs of an impending revolution which might ultimately change its color to red.

The paper uses individual farm-level data fire nearly 1,000 Indian farms to analyze (a) the well-known inverse relationship between farm size and output per acre, (b) returns to scale, and (c) imperfections in the labor market. One major result is that while predominantly wheat areas show constant returns to scale, diminishing returns seem to prevail in predominantly paddy areas. But both in paddy and wheat agriculture the observed negative relation between output per acre and farm size is likely to be the result more of an inverse relation between size and other inputs than of scale diseconomics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]