Land distribution, income generation & inequality in India's agricultural sector

This paper is a contribution to understanding income generation and inequality in India's agricultural sector. We analyse the National Sample Surveys of agriculture in 2003 and 2013 using descriptive and regression based methods, and estimate income inequality in the agricultural sector at the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Chakravorty, Sanjoy, Chandrasekhar, S, Naraparaju, Karthikeya
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2019
Subjects
Agriculture
Income inequality
India
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Summary:This paper is a contribution to understanding income generation and inequality in India's agricultural sector. We analyse the National Sample Surveys of agriculture in 2003 and 2013 using descriptive and regression based methods, and estimate income inequality in the agricultural sector at the scale of the nation and its 17 largest states. We show that: (a) there are significant state-level differences in the structures/patterns of income generation from agriculture, (b) there is a negative relationship between the amount of land owned by the household and share of wages in total income, (c) income inequality in India's agricultural sector is very high (Gini Coefficient of around 0.6 during the period), and (d) about half of the income inequality is explained by the household-level variance in income from cultivation, which in turn is primarily dependent on variance in landownership.