Andrew D. Foster

Microeconomics of Technology Adoption

Differences in technology levels across countries account for a large component of the differences in wages and per-capita GDP across countries worldwide. This article reviews micro studies of the adoption of new technologies and the use of inputs complementary with new technologies to shed light on the barriers to technology diffusion in low-income countries. Among the factors examined affecting decisions pertaining to technology choice and input allocations are the financial and nonfinancial returns to adoption, ones own learning and social learning, technological externalities, scale economies, schooling, credit constraints, risk and incomplete insurance, and departures from behavioral rules implied by simple models of rationality.

Imperfect Commitment, Altruism, and the Family: Evidence from Transfer Behavior in Low-Income Rural Areas

In this paper, we examine empirically whether risk pooling is more advantageous among altruistic compared to selfish agents in a framework where individuals cannot make binding commitments. In particular, we incorporate altuism into a model of risk sharing under imperfect commitment and use simulation methods to establish tests of the roles of both altruism and commitment problems in determining the extent of insurance and the intertemporal movements in interhousehold transfers. The tests are carried out using three panel data sets from two countries of rural South Asia that provide detailed information on transfers and enable the measurement of income shocks. The estimates provide strong support for the notion that imperfect commitment substantially constrains informal transfer arrangements, whether kin-based or not, but also provide evidence that altruism plays an important role in ameliorating commitment constraints and thus in increasing the gains from income pooling.

Economic Growth and the Rise of Forests

Although forests have diminished globally over the past 400 years, forest cover has increased in some areas, including India in the last two decades. Aggregate time-series evidence on forest growth rates and income growth across countries and within India and a newly assembled data set that combines national household survey data, census data, and satellite images of land use in rural India at the village level over a 29-year period are used to explore the hypothesis that increases in the demand for forest products associated with income and population growth lead to forest growth. The evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, which also shows that neither the expansion of agricultural productivity nor rising wages in India increased local forest cover.

Agricultural Productivity Growth, Rural Economic Diversity, and Economic Reforms: India, 1970–2000*

A salient theme in D. Gale Johnson’s work is the importance of agricultural development for general prosperity and for economic diversification (e.g., Johnson 2000). Johnson has also noted that most of the world’s poor are engaged in farming, so that a key focus of development policy is to raise the incomes of farmers. From a global perspective, increasing the productivity of agriculture, given the fixity of land, is necessary for both poverty reduction and the development of the nonagricultural sector. At the level of the world, agricultural productivity gains, poverty reduction, and the growth of the nonfarm sector are complements. However, the question remains whether these observations imply that every poor country should focus its public resources on agricultural development in order to raise the incomes of people now engaged in farming and whether such a policy is necessary for obtaining economic diversity. In this article, we use the experience of India over the past 30 years to address the issue of whether agricultural technical change actually leads to economic diversification and income growth within the rural sector in the context of an open-economy country in which there are cross-area trade and capital flows. We focus in particular on the rural sector because this is the sector in which linkages between agricultural and nonagricultural sectors are thought to be the strongest. We exploit the fact that India has maintained a policy of openness with respect to agricultural technology over this period, permitting and actively supporting agricultural development, and has moved to a reformed regime in which goods are traded and capital is more mobile in the 1990s. Evidence on the relationship between agricultural growth and nonfarm

Democratization, Decentralization and the Distribution of Local Public Goods in a Poor Rural Economy

In this paper we exploit a unique panel data set describing village governance, public goods allocations, and economic circumstances in India over the past twenty years to examine the consequences of democratization and fiscal decentralization within a model that highlights landownership-based interest groups. We first construct a simple model of two-party representative democracy with probabilistic voting in which local governments must choose to allocate public resources among three different goods representing the principal local public goods in Indian villages: roads, which primarily benefit the poor by raising wages; irrigation facilities, which differentially benefit landowners; and schools which have neutral effects. We embed the voting model in a general-equilibrium model of the rural economy in order to capture the general-equilibrium effects of changes in the landless share on the economic returns to the public goods. The model yields predictions about how the landless share affects allocations of the specific public goods under democracy relative to an alternative regime in which the local elite have a disproportionate effect on outcomes relative to that dictated by democracy. The model also has implications for the effects of ceding revenue-generating authority to the local governing body that permit an assessment of the differential burden of taxation on the rich and poor. Based on specifications consistent with the model, we then find evidence consistent with the two-party model of democracy in which increasing the population weight of the poor induces public resource allocations that increase the welfare of the poor. However, we also find that local taxes, where they are permitted, are regressive - the (landless) poor pay a higher tax rate on consumption than do the rich. Finally, we assess the growth implications of local democratization. Our evidence is consistent with almost-perfect substitution of public and private irrigation investment. Our findings thus suggest that the shift in the portfolio of local public goods associated with local democratization in part represents a transformation of a local welfare program from one that serves the rich to one that increases the welfare of the poor with possibly a net gain in total output.

A Test for Moral Hazard in the Labor Market: Contractual Arrangements, Effort, and Health

Moral hazard plays a central role in many models depicting contractual relationships involving worker effort. The authors show how time-series information on worker health, consumption, and work time can be used to measure the effort effects of payment schemes. Estimates from longitudinal data describing farming rural households indicate that time-wage payment schemes and share-tenancy contracts reduce effort compared to piece-rate payment schemes and on-farm employment. The evidence also indicates, consistent with moral hazard, that the same workers consume more calories under a piece-rate payment scheme or in on-farm employment than when employed for time wages. Copyright 1994 by MIT Press.

The dynamics of agricultural production and the calorie-income relationship: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract Panel data on farm households from rural Pakistan are used to estimate the calorie response to different components of income in an analysis that takes into account the sequential nature of agricultural production, labor and capital market imperfections, heterogeneity, and productivity effects of calories. The estimates indicate that the income-calorie relationship depends importantly on production stage, the form of income, the liquidity of assets, and the extent to which income is anticipated. The planting-stage wage-calorie elasticity is 0.61, but income increases in the food-abundant harvest stage have only small effects on calorie consumption confined to households with below-average wealth.

Information, Learning, and Wage Rates in Low-Income Rural Areas

In this essay, we present evidence that employers in rural areas of developing countries have imperfect information with regard to the productivity of heterogeneous workers. In addition to obtaining direct measures of the completeness of employer information we consider the implications of information asymmetries for the structure of casual labor markets. We then evaluate the extent to which casual labor markets do, in fact, exhibit these attributes. We find that: (1) there is adverse selection out of the time-rate labor market; (2) employers discriminate statistically: given two workers with different observed characteristics but the same actual productivity, the worker from the group with the higher average productivity will have a higher wage; (3) employers exhibit learning over time: the extent of employer ignorance is negatively related to labor-market exposure on the part of the workers; and (4) calorie consumption affects productivity but is not rewarded in the time-rate labor market. In concluding we argue that an analysis of wage and employment patterns and the implications of these patterns for human capital investment in rural areas of developing countries that ignored the role of information problems could yield misleading conclusions.

Comparative Advantage, Information and the Allocation of Workers to Tasks: Evidence from an Agricultural Labour Market

We use data from an agricultural labour market in which workers receive both time- and piece-rate wages and shift frequently among employers and tasks, to assess the roles of comparative advantage, information problems and preferences in determining the allocation of workers. The estimates which impose minimal structure not implied by economic theory are consistent with a one-factor productivity model, and indicate that information asymmetries are present but workers are sorted according to comparative advantage. In particular, the disproportionate presence of female workers in weeding activities is due not to worker or employer preferences but to comparative advantage and statistical discrimination.

Household partition in rural Bangladesh.

In this paper the author uses longitudinal data collected in rural Bangladesh to [examine] the process of household partition. There are three main parts to the paper. The first consists of a descriptive analysis of household structure which indicates that partition is an important determinant of household structure in this population particularly for young couples in the early stages of family formation. Secondly a procedure is developed for the analysis of household partition which makes use of data on relationship to head of household....Thirdly data on the educational attainment of children are used to provide an indirect measure of the extent to which recently partitioned households continued to operate as a single economic and social unit. Although partitioned households remained in close proximity they exhibited significant independence with regard to decisions about the educational attainment of children something that is not apparent in jointly-resident sub-households. (EXCERPT)