Non-farm Employment Among Rural Women: Trend and Determinants
As the share of agriculture in gross domestic product decreases with economic growth, so does its share in employment. Over time this leads to a shift in the rural occupational structure toward different non-agricultural and non-farm activities. A vibrant
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1 Introduction As the share of agriculture in gross domestic product (GDP) decreases with economic growth, so does its share in employment. Over time this leads to a shift in the rural occupational structure toward different non-agricultural and non-farm activities. A vibrant rural non-farm sector has the potential of reducing disguised unemployment in agriculture, forced migration toward urban centers, rural poverty, and rural income inequality. The post-1991 reform years in India have witnessed a rapid transition from agriculture to the services sector, leading to livelihood diversification toward the non-agricultural activities and a transformation of the occupational structure in the rural areas. The share of workers engaged in non-agricultural activities as their main occupation has increased from 21.8–23.7% during the 1990s to 32.1% in 2010. Rural non-farm employment (RNFE) helps farm-based households to spread their risks, offers more remunerative activities to supplement or replace agricultural income during lean seasons, and provides means to cope when farming fails, which in turn has the potential of reducing rural poverty levels and distress-led migration to urban areas. However, these positive developments will be taking place when the occupational shift, from agriculture to non-agricultural activities, reflects the maturing of growth-led forces in the economy and not as a result of demographic pressure on cultivable land coupled with adverse trends in the agrarian sector. It is, therefore, important to identify the reasons behind the change in the rural occu-
A. Dhara (&) Department of Economics, Rishi Bankim Chandra Evening College, Naihati, India e-mail: [email protected] B. Chatterjee Department of Economics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 C. Neogi et al. (eds.), Women’s Entrepreneurship and Microfinance, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4268-3_5
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pational structure, to determine whether the growth in RNFE is driven by growthand prosperity-related ‘pull’ factors or due to distress-driven ‘push’ factors. This chapter focuses on the forces behind the growth of non-farm employment among rural women in India during the post-reform decades. There are two major research questions addressed in this study—how the rural female workforce in India has changed during the post-reform decades, on industrial subsectors and employment status? And which factors drive the growth in rural female non-farm employment during this period—‘distress-driven’ or ‘growth-driven’? The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. We begin with a brief survey of the literature on determinants of RNFE in Sect. 2 and discuss some major hypotheses. Section 3 introduces the data used in our analysis and Sect. 4 gives a macroeconomic overview of the data. In Sect. 5, we undertake a panel data regression analysis on the dataset, to find out the significant determinants. Section 6 concludes the chapter with some policy su
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