John Harriss

The new institutional economics and Third World development

The new institutional economics is one of the the most important new bodies of theory to emerge in economics in recent years. The contributors to this volume address its significance for the developing world. The book is a major contribution to an area of debate still in its formative phase. The book challenges the orthodoxies of development, especially concerning the role of markets. It includes articles from Robert Bates, John Toye and Nobel Laureate Douglass North.

MIDDLE-CLASS ACTIVISM AND THE POLITICS OF THE INFORMAL WORKING CLASS

ABSTRACT This article, drawing on the results of both survey research and of ethnography in Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai, concerns the relationships between the middle class and the informal working class in Indian cities in the sphere of civil society. These relationships are shown to be very significant in the definition of the “middle class” and a critical dimension of the reproduction of class relationships. They also demonstrate that civil society should not be abstracted from the field of class relations, in the way that characterizes some contemporary arguments about the potentials of civil organization. Civil society is shown to be distinctly stratified. On the whole it is a sphere of middle class activism, and such activism is one of the defining features of the middle class. Members of the informal working class, on the other hand, are largely excluded from active participation in civil society organizations, so that increasing opportunities for political participation through civil organization may be associated with increased political inequality. The exceptions to this general rule are sometimes interlinked movements for women’s rights, for the rights of informal workers, and for rights to housing—in which women from the informal working class are notably active. The issues of housing and of rights to livelihood, however, frequently bring the middle class and the informal working class into contention. Politics is often the only resource available to informal workers and their valuation of electoral democracy is to be understood in this context

Does the 'depressor' still work? Agrarian structure and development in India: a review of evidence and argument

The article reviews evidence on agrarian change in India, including studies of the impact of the ‘green revolution’, of agrarian politics, and of rural labour. The classic thesis proposed by Daniel Thorner concerning the existence of a built‐in ‘depressor’ in Indian agriculture is then examined in the light of recent evidence and argument. It is suggested that the thesis, like much of the literature on agrarian structure and change in India, crucially neglects the way in which agrarian processes are influenced by larger political economic forces, Taking a dialectical view of change must mean reversing this neglect of power and politics.

Urban poverty and urban poverty alleviation

Abstract Very poor people are likely to be found in greater numbers in cities than in rural areas by the end of the century. This article argues that casually employed wage workers are those who are likely to be most vulnerable, and that programmes including education and health care are needed to reduce their vulnerability. Whereas the encouragement of ‘small-scale’ industry has been considered important for income generation, this no longer seems justifiable, but there is still a potential in low-cost schemes for the provision of credit and other assistance to ‘micro’ enterprises from which poor people can derive more secure incomes.

‘Generative’ or ‘parasitic’ urbanism? Some observations from the recent history of a South Indian market town

Using data from sample surveys in a South Indian market town in 1973 and 1982–3, the paper examines the different views ofMellor andLipton on the relations of small towns and their hinterlands, in the context of a growing agricultural economy. It is shown that the pattern of demand which has been generated by the ‘green revolution’ has not encouraged decentralised production, as in Mellors model. It does appear, however, that a net transfer of resources from the countryside to the town, such as Lipton ‘s model postulates, has been taking place, though the authors remain sceptical about this model as an explanation.

Why Some of the Poor Get Richer: Economic Change and Mobility in Rural Western India [and Comments]

To the extent that peasants, particularly Indian peasants, are ever considered to be economically mobile, they are generally seen from one of two perspectives: either the Malthusian perspective, which predicts that most landholdings will shrink over time, due to partitioning among multiple heirs; or the Marxian perspective, which predicts that a few landholdings will increase in size at the expense of the vast majority-the latter diminishing, in many cases, to nothing at all. These two perspectives can be used to generate a number of specific hypotheses concerning changes in the distribution of land in rural India. Naturally, some of the Malthusian hypotheses contradict Marxian ones, but there are others which are mutually congruent (the poor will generally get poorer, from either perspective, though the rich also get richer, according to the latter). In this paper, historical and contemporary data collected from a highly commercialized and densely populated village in western India are used to test a number of these hypotheses. Where the Malthusian and Marxian hypotheses are congruent, they sometimes appear to fit the data. However, most of these data are better explained by exogenous factors, such as migration, than by the hypotheses which they appear superficially to confirm. In addition, where the Malthusian and Marxian hypotheses contradict each other, the former show a better fit with the data. The reason is simply that the largest landholdings did not get larger, they got smaller. Moreover, while many of the smaller holdings also diminished, some got larger. The concentration of landholdings has not increased, contrary to the Marxian hypotheses. Most interestingly, neither set of hypotheses can explain the significant amount of upward mobility which has ocurred among smallholders, and even among those who were landless. Coupled with frequent downward mobility among landholders of all sizes, this means an unexpectedly low correlation between the size of a familys holding in 1920 and its size in 1970. The distribution of land is neither rigidly fixed by a static social system nor deteriorating according to a pattern predicted by the Malthusian or Marxian perspectives. Since the village in question has undergone intensive commercialization, this implies that commercialization as such is not necessarily a cause of increased poverty and inequality.

Japanization: Context and culture in the Indonesian automotive industry

Abstract Debates on the Japanization of industry in the United Kingdom and United States have focused on the link between technical and social practices. Technical practices are transferred from Japan, but social practices have to be modified or recreated. In the Indonesian automotive industry, firms with strong links to Japanese producers are still operating on a small scale, and with limited use of Japanese technical practices. Many of the Japanese social practices, however, are made possible by the characteristics of labor institutions in Indonesia.

Whatever Happened to Cultural Nationalism in Tamil Nadu? A Reading of Current Events and the Recent Literature on Tamil Politics

This article was first written shortly before elections to the State Legislative Assembly of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in May 2001. Of these elections the Economic and Political Weekly’s correspondent wrote: ‘Never before in the election history of this state – and probably of any other state in the Union – has an election been riddled with so much uncertainty, confusion and complication.’ At the time he was writing the alignments of significant political parties in Tamil Nadu had been thrown up in the air following the decision in February of the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) of S. Ramadoss to quit the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), in which it had stood alongside the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagan (DMK), led by M. Karunanidhi, and to ally itself with the All India Annadurai Dravida Munnetra Kazhagan (AIADMK) of Jayalalitha Jayaram. Shortly afterwards further confusion was added when another participant in the NDA alliance, (‘Vaiko’) V. Gopalsamy’s Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), parted company with the DMK, even whilst remaining within the Alliance at the national level. As things turned out, after much bickering and horse-trading, two alliances centred respectively on the DMK and the AIADMK, confronted each other in the polls. This reflected the enduring hostility between the two principal parties to which the Dravidian Movement gave rise, and the bitter rivalry between their leaders; and then the calculations of the leaders of other parties, taking account of caste factors in particular, though often veiled by protestations about commitments to ‘secularism’ on the one hand or the need to struggle against corruption or casteism on the other. The two alliances included some strange bedfellows. The strangest combination of all was the DMK, the principal inheritor of the rationalist, secular and socially radical tradition of the Dravidian Movement, allied with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – as it had been

The great tradition globalizes : reflections on two studies of ‘The Industrial Leaders’ of Madras

The title of the paper alludes to Milton Singers book When A Great Tradition Modernizes: an anthropological approach to Indian civilization, and particularly to Part IV of the book. This has the title ‘Modernization and Traditionalization’ and includes a long essay called ‘Industrial Leadership, the Hindu Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism-described in a review by Richard Park at the time as ‘the capstone’ of the book as a whole.

Agrarian Transformation in the Third World

The historical geography of the advanced capitalist countries may be understood as the story of the dissolution of peasant production. While there was considerable variety in the organisation of rural production in Europe in the pre-industrial era,1 and though changes took place in different ways and over different periods, it is possible to interpret them in terms of the model of ‘agrarian transformation’ which we lay out in this essay. Our interest, however, is in the analysis of economic and social change in the ‘Third World’, and a major theoretical and empirical question concerns the relevance of this essentially historical model of transformation to the study of contemporary development. The conception of agrarian transformation that we elaborate must not be treated in a deterministic fashion. The future of the Third World cannot be read off from the future of medieval Europe, as we show in the later sections of the essay (see Taylor, Chapter 5.1 for a more general discussion of this question).