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Opportunities off the Farm as a Springboard out of Rural Poverty: Five Decades of Development in an Indian Village

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Pathways Out of Poverty

Abstract

The interaction between economic growth and poverty has long been a central theme of economics. An early and influential view of the development process was set out by Arthur Lewis (1954). According to that view, growth takes place against a backdrop of labor transfer from traditional subsistence agriculture to a modern sector, often tacitly assumed to be industrial and urban. In recent years, analysts have increasingly questioned whether such a process of intersectoral transfer must necessarily occur between the rural and urban sectors, or whether the rural non-farm sector can serve as an alternative to the modern urban sector. Closely related has been an interest in tracing the distributional consequences of a growing non-farm sector, especially the impact on poverty.1

The views presented in this paper are the authors’ and should not be taken to represent those of the World Bank or any of its affiliates. All errors are the authors’.

Gary Fields (1980, 2000) demonstrates that the Lewis process of intersectoral transfer is able to generate the well-known “inverted U-Curve” of rising and then falling income inequality, first described by Stanley Kuznets (1955, 1963).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amsterdam Institute of International Development, Amsterdam

    Peter Lanjouw (Dutch national, lead economist in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank, and fellow)

  2. World Bank, USA

    Nicholas Stern (Chief economist and senior vice president, development economics)

Authors
  1. Peter Lanjouw
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  2. Nicholas Stern
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of International and Comparative Labor, Cornell University, USA

    Gary S. Fields (Professor in the Department of Labor Econmics and chair) (Professor in the Department of Labor Econmics and chair)

  2. International Finance Corporation, World Bank Group, USA

    Guy Pfeffermann (Chief economist) (Chief economist)

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© 2003 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank

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Lanjouw, P., Stern, N. (2003). Opportunities off the Farm as a Springboard out of Rural Poverty: Five Decades of Development in an Indian Village. In: Fields, G.S., Pfeffermann, G. (eds) Pathways Out of Poverty. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0009-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0009-3_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-8213-5404-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-010-0009-3

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