Structural Transformation and the Rural-Urban Divide
2013/08/27
研討會日期 : 2013-08-27
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Amartya Lahiri
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Amartya Lahiri received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Maryland at College Park in 1995. He is currently Royal Bank Faculty Research Professor of Economics at University of British Columbia. His research fields are international economics and macroeconomics.
演講摘要 : Development of an economy typically goes hand-in-hand with a declining importance of agriculture in output and employment. Given the primarily rural population in developing countries and their concentration in agrarian activities, this has potentially large implications for inequality along the development path. We examine the Indian experience between 1983 and 2010, a period when India has been undergoing such a transformation. We find a significant decline in the wage differences between individuals in rural and urban India during this period. However, individual characteristics such as education, occupation choices and migration account for at most 40 percent of the wage convergence. We use a two-sector model of structural transformation to rationalize the rest of the rural-urban convergence in India as the consequence of two factors: (i) differential sectoral income elasticities of demand along with productivity growth; and (ii) higher labor supply growth in urban areas. Quantitative results suggest that the model can account for 70 percent of the unexplained wage convergence between rural and urban areas.
