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This paper is a contribution to understanding income generation and inequality in India's agricultural sector. We analyze the National Sample Surveys of agriculture in 2003 and 2013 using descriptive and regression based methods, and estimate income inequality in the agricultural sector at the scale of the nation and its 17 largest states. We show that: (a) there are significant state‐level differences in the structures/patterns of income generation from agriculture, (b) there is a negative relationship between the amount of land owned by the household and share of wages in total income, (c) income inequality in India's agricultural sector is very high (Gini Coefficient of around 0.6 during the period), and (d) about half of the income inequality is explained by the household‐level variance in income from cultivation, which in turn is primarily dependent on variance in landownership.

In developing countries, lack of formal contract enforcement mechanisms is compensated by informal or relational governance enforced through trust, kinship, reputation, etc AbstractIn developing countries, lack of formal contract enforcement mechanisms is compensated by informal or relational governance enforced through trust, kinship, reputation, etc. This paper focuses on one such setting in India"s urban informal economy: the "day labour" market for casual labour. We survey seven such markets in Navi Mumbai (a city on the outskirts of Mumbai), and find considerable incidence of contract enforcement problems in the form of employers reneging on wage payments to labourers. We find that payments to labourers with access to social networks and a record of work done are less likely to be reneged. Further, consistent with the literature on the limits of relation-based contract enforcement, we find that labourers in large markets, with greater linguistic and caste-based diversity, are more likely to be reneged. We argue that interventions aimed at facilitating access to formal mechanisms might help overcome some of the limitations with relation-based enforcement.

We develop a measure of unemployment that takes into account both the duration and intensity of unemployment.This measure satisfies several desirable properties, including distribution sensitivity, which deals with differences among the unemployed. It is particularly suited to developing countries because individuals in these countries display considerable variation in labor force participation, unemployment duration, and unemployment intensity. It can also be decomposed into mean and variance components and contributions to unemployment by various subgroups of the population. We use this measure and data from National Sample Surveys on employment and unemployment to understand unemployment in India during the period 1993 to 2012. We show that unemployment has generally fallen, although the distribution of unemployment has worsened. Moreover, unemployment is driven to a greater extent by higher educated groups; the unemployment among these groups is also fairly substantial. We explain these findings and suggest some policies.

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