As India integrates into the global economy, its villages are integrating into a rapidly growing urban economy. One of the links through which this is happening is labour markets, where demand for labour to undertake non-farm jobs has been growing. This has led to a rise in the share of non-farm...

The recent rapid growth of China’s economy has reopened historical debate about the extent to which it prospered during the Míng and Qīng dynasties (1368-1911) through developing a significant market orientation on the base of its underlying agricultural bureaucratic feudalism. As a...

This paper studies the evolution of the rural non-farm sector in India and its contribution to the decline of poverty. It scrutinizes evidence from a series of nationally representative sample surveys and confronts findings from these sources against the experience of poverty decline in a...

This work is based on a programme of work in Palanpur from 1974, based primarily at the LSE, and uses two previous studies from the Agricultural Economics Research Centre of the University in Delhi from 1957/8 and 1962/3. There are now six surveys of the village, one for every decade since...

How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? To shed new light on these questions, I collect archival data from colonial India and use it to estimate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by six predictions from a general...

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