Long-run trends in rural wages

Basole, Amit (2017) Long-run trends in rural wages. Mint.

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Abstract

Wage rates for agricultural and non-agricultural labour in rural India have been in the news recently. First, in his The Indian Express column, Surjit Bhalla argued that demonetization was not bad for the rural economy since the growth of wage rates had increased from around 2% in mid-2016 to 5.7% in mid-2017. There followed a response by Himanshu in The Indian Express, using the same data to show that Bhalla’s conclusions were valid only for select occupations. More importantly, he pointed out that a recovery in rural wages had started before demonetization and that this recovery came on the heels of a longer period of declining real wages since May 2014. However, he used wage levels rather than growth rates in his analysis and interpreted Bhalla as saying that demonetization had increased wage rates. Both these points were criticized by Bhalla in his response.

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Newspaper Article

Authors:

Basole, Amit

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