The optimism of Arthur Lewis's development model permeated other models appearing in its trail. Lewis pictured a steady process of expansion of the industrial sector on the basis of agricultural surplus available as wage goods and 'surplus labor' drawn from the agricultural sector, enabling both sectors to reap benefits of development. Ranis-Fei, too, identified agricultural suplus as key to growth, but revealed more awareness of snags like 'premature' migration from the rural sector to the urban sector, the 'terms of trade' between the sectors, etc. They minimized these by postulating the 'dualistic landlord' ensuring proper allocation of surplus between the two sectors for balanced growth. / Development experience belied these expectations. Benefits of development failed to reach subsistence agriculture in appreciable measure. Lewis' model was amiss in assuming a competitive industrial sector and a homogeneous agricultural sector. In India, the industrial sector is oligopolistic and the agricultural sector a multi-tiered hierarchy of big farmers, tenants, agricultural labor and small family-farmers, leading to sub-optimal allocation of resources, retardation of labor-absorption and premature, pre-emptive capital-intensity in production in a labor-rich, capital-poor economy, perpetuation of poverty, inequality and restricted home-market--the missing link of development. Hence the quest for policy to avoid these consequences. / In development experience Taiwan (starting with agrarian reforms) is an exception, combining high growth rate with benefits going more to bottom than top, contradicting the inverted U hypothesis (implied in Lewis' model) of prolonged accentuation of inequality preceding decline in it and raising the question whether equity can form the basis of growth elsewhere. In this study answer has been sought to this question, by cross-section analysis of district-level agricultural data and Gini indices of inequality of land-ownership in the first phase of 'green revolution' in India, in terms of how the size of agricultural surplus might have been affected by adequate agrarian reforms. The answer found is favorable to equity-based, decentralized growth and hence to feasibility of balanced growth with benefits to subsistence agriculture through higher labor-absorption, larger home-market for mass-consumption goods, etc. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-12, Section: A, page: 3974. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74999 |
| Contributors | DATTA, ANINDYA., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 189 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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