Impact of technological change on income distribution and poverty in Bangladesh agriculture: an empirical analysis
✍ Scribed by Sanzidur Rahman
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 158 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0954-1748
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Distributional impacts of technological change and/or Green Revolution' have been mixed despite the fact that spread of this technology has been fastest of all in the history of technological innovations in agriculture. The overwhelming belief in the pursuit of this high-input payo' model of agricultural development is due to its potential in increasing foodgrain productivity, employment as well as income (seen in many countries during 1960±1970s), thereby, alleviating poverty and hunger.
The degree of controversy on the distributional impacts of modern agricultural technology becomes clear in Freebairn (1995), whose analyses on the results of 307 studies undertaken during the period 1970±89 revealed that about 80 per cent of these studies had conclusions that the new technology widened both inter-farm and interregional income inequality. Interestingly, he noted that the nature of conclusion drawn in these studies were in¯uenced by regional origin of the authors', location of the study area', methodology followed', and the geographic extension of the study area'. In his words, `studies done by Western developed-country authors, those employing an essay approach, and those looking at multi-country region are most likely to conclude that income inequalities increased. By contrast, work done by Asia-origin authors, with study areas located in India or the Philippines, and using the case study method are more likely to conclude that increasing inequality is not associated with the new technology' (Freebairn, 1995, p. 265).
Scale non-neutrality has been one of the major criticisms of `Green Revolution' (Wharton, 1969;Falcon, 1970;Grin, 1974) as well as high capital intensity that favour large farmers who are equipped with better information and ®nancial