Wage Labour in Developing Agriculture: Risk, Effort and Economic Development

This is an examination of farm decision-making, incorporating the elements of risk in both production, and in particular, in off-farm or casual wage labour. The correlation between labour market risk is examined and found to dampen the employment possibilities in a closed village labour market. The received empirical literature does not consider the influence of risk on the demand for hired labour even though the importance of risk factors have increased over time. The study finds that the influence of risk in the hiring-in of labour may have significant consequences for rural economies. Farm household decision-making is studied within a household production framework, since farmers are both consumers and producers of their staples. The representative consumer model implicitly employed by some of the earlier studies analyzing the supply of labour would, therefore, be inappropriate, and may yield seriously biased results. For this study the author gained access to a cross-section/time series data set that provides information on a large number of variables of interest. The book sets out to expand the existing literature in the aforementioned areas and examines issues of wage determination, pricing, commodity price stabilization, producer income and output.