The focus of this paper is on the rural poor of south Asia and their struggle to cope with the seasonal risk of unemployment and the ensuing income risks. In the absence of formal credit or insurance markets the rural poor typically resort to, among other options, the following informal...

This paper looks at the causes of rural conflict in 1930s Spain. Rather than stressing bottom-up forces of mobilisation linked to poor harvests and rural unemployment or the inability of the state to enforce reformist legislation, this paper explores the role of state policy in sorting out the...

In a country such as China, which maintains strict controls on foreign exchange and frequently intervenes in the currency market, it is not surprising that the local currency is persistently undervalued in nominal terms. Normally, one would expect such a policy of deliberate currency...

Farmers in high-income countries invest in the political process to gain access to foreign workers, with potentially far-reaching social welfare ramifications both at home and abroad. This review examines the unique features of the farm labor market that result in an intimate relationship...

The Spanish 2nd Republic (1931-1936) witnessed one of the fastest and deepest processes of popular mobilization in interwar Europe, generating a decisive reactionary wave that brought the country to the Civil War (1936-1939). We show in the paper that both contemporary comment and part of the...

Based on primary survey data, the study begins with a brief overview of the theoretical and empirical evidence on employment and livelihoods for rural households in Chapter I. A macro picture of the economy of Uttaranchal is presented in Chapters II and III based on the secondary data. The...

The study attempts to highlight the inter-relation between three central points in the ongoing debate on the political economy of development: viability, surplus, and class-formation. A case study of the development of rural labour systems in Northern Nigeria is meant to provide both a better...

Using machine learning methods in a difference-in-differences setting, we quantify the population of informal workers generated by an irregular migration shock. We exploit the exogenous variation from the Arab Spring wave on southern Italian coasts, and a rich data on Italian vineyards. We...

Immigration enforcement often brings unintended consequences in domestic labor markets. Using the universe of administrative immigration data from 2005 to 2019, we uncover evidence that the E-Verify, an employment verification mandate, exacerbates the ongoing farm labor shortage in the US....

The continued transfer of agricultural labor into the industrial sector is crucial to China's transformation into an industrial economy. We argue in this paper that rural industry offers an alternative to urban industry for receiving agricultural labor from areas without off-farm employment...