TITLE:
Growth Dynamics and Gender Wage Inequality in Indian Agricultural Sector: Study across Various Population Hierarchies of Villages
AUTHORS:
Shashi Kant Srivastava, Tuhin Sengupta
KEYWORDS:
Agricultural Wages, Wage Inequality, Wage Equation, Indian Villages, Robust Regression
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.6 No.3,
June
3,
2016
ABSTRACT: This paper studies three important issues of Indian agricultural
sector, namely, the determinants of the agricultural wages in India, the extent
to which gender inequality is present in it, and the variations in this
inequality within various population hierarchies of Indian villages. The paper
employs robust regression technique to deal with the presence of outliers and
heteroskedasticity. Results suggest that there are four major factors that
determine the agricultural wages, namely, non-farm wage factors, accessibility
factors, production factors, and individual factors. Gender wage disparity is
to an extent of 23% against women in comparison to the men. Furthermore, village
growth is detrimental to the agricultural wages in comparison to non-farm wages
and female agricultural wages are more disadvantaged with growing dynamics of
villages.