Rainfall shocks and gender wage gap: Agricultural labor in India

Type Report
Title Rainfall shocks and gender wage gap: Agricultural labor in India
Author(s)
Publisher Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi Centre
City New Delhi
Country/State India
URL http://www.isid.ac.in/~pu/conference/dec_12_conf/Papers/KanikaMahajan.pdf
Abstract
Most studies of economic crises study the impacts of recessions on urban labor markets. Very few papers consider the effect of crises in the rural areas on rural labor markets. The most common crisis in developing countries is the variability in rainfall which affects demand for agricultural labor in rural areas. Previous studies have shown that productivity shocks in agriculture like rainfall variability affect wages adversely. None of the studies however consider the heterogeneity in the impact of these shocks on agricultural wages by gender, a feature which has been well-studied for the urban labor markets for developed countries. Using National Sample survey data for India from 1993 to 2007, I create a district level panel dataset to examine how rainfall shocks, which affect demand for labor in Indian agriculture, affect wage gap in agriculture between males and females. Overall, we find that such shocks do not affect the wage gap, but low rainfall years affect the wage gap adversely in the rainfed rice growing regions of India. This finding is consistent with greater value of female labor in rice cultivation which is also a crop highly sensitive to rainfall variability under rain-fed conditions. The paper concludes that the effect of rainfall shocks on gender wage gap in agriculture depends upon the gender roles underlying the technology of production in agriculture which varies across cropping systems.

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