Barbara Harriss-White

Testing market integration: New approaches with case material from the West Bengal food economy

Given the inferential dangers of received methods, a new methodology is introduced to provide a sequence of tests, using weekly spot prices, to examine the dynamic relationship of market commodity prices in three locations in West Bengal. Tests suggest that the markets are integrated, but a lower degree of integration of paddy and rice prices is identified. The hypothesis of full market integration is rejected. Structural and institutional factors which affect the specifics of performance are identified. Physical isolation, the institutional complexity of marketing systems and contractual forms, the polarisation of assets, assets specificity, the institutional control of information and price formation, the underdevelopment of linked markets and the idiosyncratic implementation of state regulatory policy and auto‐regulatory responses enter the explanation.

The Gender Sensitivity of Well‐being Indicators

This article evaluates the gender sensitivity of indicators of health nutrition education and composite indices which are relevant to developing countries using the analytical framework of functionings . First the functionings framework within which well-being will be assessed is outlined. The following sections discuss indicators of basic functionings and additionally present an outline of their implications for policy and future research. Reference bibliographies are also included. Findings showed that a constituent under-10 female/male ratio (at 0-4 years and 5-9 years) appears to be a suitable indicator for health. By contrast the morbidity and nutrition outcome indicators suffer methodological and conceptual problems which render them unreliable. Anthropometric measures are potentially useful given appropriate norms and standardized cut-off points and provided that their limitations are borne in mind when interpreting findings arrived at by using them. In assessing gender gaps in education enrolment and drop-out ratios are more useful than level of adult literacy or mean number of years of schooling but micro-level research is required to decide which of these two indicators is more reliable. Composite indices like the Physical Quality of Life Index and Gender-Related Development Index are potentially useful although they require some alterations to increase their relevance to developing countries.

Globalization, the Financial Crisis and Petty Production in India's Socially Regulated Informal Economy

ABSRACT This essay explores theoretical and practical problems arising from the impact of liberalization/globalization and its latest crisis on India’s informal economy heavily populated by petty commodity producers (PCP) and petty traders. Its theoretical focus is the distinction between PCP and ‘labour’ more generally because it is now common practice theoretically to elide the two kinds of work. Reviewing field material it focuses on two aspects of India’s informal economy – the persistence of small firms and their regulation by social institutions rather than by the state. These social institutions express identity as well as class. Its practical concerns are on the impact of globalization on PCP and labour in global value chains and the effects of the financial crisis on PCP in India’s informal economy.

Capitalism and the Common Man: Peasants and Petty Production in Africa and South Asia

In 1976, the political sociologist of Africa, Gavin Williams, controversially ‘took the part of peasants’ in an essay, the critique of which had far-reaching impacts. Africa’s common man was then a peasant. In this article, the method of his essay is used to structure a review of petty commodity production (PCP) in India four decades later. India’s ‘common man’ is a petty producer. In neo-liberalizing India, PCP is numerically the commonest form of production and contributes roughly as much to GDP as the corporate sector. Reproducing by multiplication rather than accumulation, it drives growth in Indian livelihoods. Without pretence to being exhaustive, the article uses eclectic micro-level literatures to explore the internal logics of PCP (found to be varied), the circuits and relations of exchange in which PCP fails to accumulate (also very varied), the state’s economic project for PCP (incoherent), and the politics of PCP (mediated, marginalized and divisive).

Introduction: India's rainfed agricultural dystopia

The semi-arid tropics of India (SAT), home to about 40% of the country’s population (8% of the nworld’s), are distinguished by low and erratically distributed precipitation, heterogeneous soil ncatenas, a growing season of 2.5 to 6 months and a complex system of agricultural production nadapted to conditions of high risk. At a very conservative estimate the SAT produces 37% of ntotal agricultural output, covering a third of India’s irrigated agriculture, just under half India’s nnet cultivated area, and just under two-thirds of its cereals, oilseeds and other commercial crops n(Rao, this volume). It is the SAT that is one of two epicentres of agrarian poverty in India, the nother being the Ganges valley and its littoral – and that is the scene of its protracted agricultural ncrisis. And it is in the semi-arid tropics of India rather than the canal- and well-irrigated nwheat/rice-bowl of the north-west, or the transformed rice production of the formerly landlorddominated nnorth-east Ganges valley, that solutions should have been sought to two agrarian nquestions that are at the heart of agricultural development. nThe first classical agrarian question concerns the capitalist transformation of agriculture, its nmany trajectories and distributional consequences; the second concerns the economic roles nagriculture must play to service the development of the rest of the economy, while the first ntransformation is taking place. The two are in obvious tension. The first is framed conceptually nin terms of neo-Marxian political economy the second more in the problematique of ndevelopment economics. For the first, private property rights over land must be established and nenforced, while for the second agricultural land and its property relations must be yielded up and nsequestered for non-agricultural activity and infrastructure. For the first, productive investment nis necessary in agriculture and its linked sectors; while for the second, agriculture has nhistorically had to be squeezed. For the first, family or un-free labour must be transformed into a nwage labour force – either directly or indirectly through control by merchants and financiers of nsmallholding production.2 For the second, labour must be shed, but not at a rate which noverwhelms the capacity of the urban-industrial economy to absorb it. States have been, are, and n– even in a ‘market-led’ era – must be unavoidably implicated in this process. nIndia’s agricultural sector has answered the call of the second agrarian question, performing nthe necessary role of providing food, basic agro-industrial raw materials and wage goods (such nas cotton textiles), labour and financial resources for the development of the non-agricultural neconomy – while agrarian society provides a national market for its consumer goods. Although nagriculture has more than doubled its foodgrains production, its share of GDP has fallen from nbeing about 70% at Independence to about 25–20% now. Yet the agrarian questions remain as nrelevant now. This introductory essay will explain why, and set the contributions of this special nissue on semi-arid tropical agriculture into context.

The identification of market exogeneity and market dominance by tests instead of assumption: An application to Indian material

It is normally the case in research on market price to identify the central market either by looking at population data, the volume and directions of flows of commodities, and by identifying nodes on transport networks or by spotting it as the physical centre of regulatory intervention. This however may not be the most safe way to proceed if the geographical flows of a commodity among the domestic markets do not provide strong evidence about the spatial direction of price causation. In the present paper the central market is defined in terms of dominance and exogeneity and a series of tests are provided to help to define and distinguish an exogeneous and dominant (central) market among the marketplace price series. The tests are applied to three crop markets and to three market places in India. The results strongly suggest that it is possible to identify the central market by testing instead of simply by making a more or less empirically justified assumption.

The changing public role in services to food and agriculture : The legal regulation of food markets in India

Abstract A framework allowing the commercial transfer of property rights is an essential prerequisite to market exchange widely considered the prerogative of the state. Here, the social history of the legal regulation of agricultural markets in central, south and northeast India is examined. Regulatory law is shown to be riven with unanticipated outcomes, working as intended only under rare conditions of competition and absence of preharvest commercial debt. Meso level institutions of collective action and micro level behaviour by firms also regulate exchange, unsystematically according to their multiple objectives. Foreign funded projects and another layer of customary procedure. In the light of this analysis, the current policy debates over agricultural market reform are discussed and an analytical framework and suggestions for reform are offered.

Microfinance studies : introduction and overview

Microfinance (MF) has grown over the last two decades into an important sub-field of development studies. This special issue of Oxford Development Studies explores the contributions of MF, drawing particularly on research conducted in India. After a brief overview of the emergence of MF as a research field, this introduction develops three themes. First, we argue that MF interventions generally involve, and assume a process of transformation of, financially excluded people and groups who are not fully dominated by the logic of market exchange but have histories, culture, social relationships and politics structured by other kinds of authority and dynamics. Second, we argue that understanding MF interventions at the local level requires the social and political analysis of global development architecture, while MF may also play a role in consolidating or cementing global political economy at its base. Third, we argue that MF interventions have provided fertile ground for research into the causes and consequences of poverty. The introduction ends with summaries of the contents of the special issue.

Matter in Motion: Work and Livelihoods in India’s Economy of Waste

All human society produces waste matter which has no value: in the circuits of capital in production, distribution, consumption, the production of labour and the reproduction of society. Some waste matter remains without value indefinitely, and other regains value in reuse, recycling and reprocessing. India’s waste sector is one of the fastest growing in the world. This chapter analyses the livelihoods and life worlds generated by liquid and solid wastes in the circuits of capital of a small town in South India. It combines the analysis of 84 such livelihoods with four workers’ own descriptions, chosen to represent the livelihoods and life worlds of the public sector salariat, informal wage work, self-employment and petty capital. The workforce is disproportionately Dalit and Adivasi. Conditions are dangerous, and the work is extremely hard. Formal contracts prove incomplete and informal labour depends on patronage, discretion and bonding. This chapter concludes with reflections on incomes and social stigma in this sector.

Globalisation, Economic Citizenship, and India’s Inclusive Developementalism

Harriss-White, Mishra, and Prakash argue that citizenship is a universal concept that might have a tenuous bearing on reality. There is no consensus about the concept of economic citizenship, which, they suggest is currently being exported from the European heartland to developing countries in private aid-driven projects of social entrepreneurship. It is replete with tensions. Unlike the concept of political citizenship, economic citizenship is not a concept of formal equality. Hariss-White et al. analyze the role of the state, markets and civil society in furthering the project with a range of proxy labels which de facto advances economic citizenship. Through a case study of Arunachal they show the role of a non-state, non-market institution—ethnicity—in structuring and differentiating economic citizenship.