In a well-argued post, Fellow Blogbhartian Bhupinder reviews Sagarika Ghose’s “Farming the Colonial Dream” and questions the premise of doing away with agriculture in India and walking the Chinese path.
Linked by BA. Join Blogbharti facebook group.She ignores what is practically an urban nightmare in China. Overwhelming migration from rural areas, a reversal of the 1960s forced migration, has led to increasing social problems. While uprooting the people from their villages and providing cheap, unprotected labour in a country that does not permit forming of labour unions for unrestricted exploitation so severe that in many areas, there is a reversal in trends with people migrating back to villages.
There is a special issue of Science Magazine on urbanization dated feb. 8, 2008. Unfortunately the articles need suscription. Here is the abstract of one of the survey articles.
Urbanization and the Wealth of Nations
David E. Bloom,* David Canning, Günther Fink
The proportion of a country’s population living in urban areas is highly correlated with its level of income. Urban areas offer economies of scale and richer market structures, and there is strong evidence that workers in urban areas are individually more productive, and earn more, than rural workers. However, rapid urbanization is also associated with crowding, environmental degradation, and other impediments to productivity. Overall, we find no evidence that the level of urbanization affects the rate of economic growth. Our findings weaken the rationale for either encouraging or discouraging urbanization as part of a strategy for economic growth.
Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: dbloom@hsph.harvard.edu
Gaddeswarup – thanks very much for that useful piece of info. Who’d hve thought that anyone would say that urbanisation does not affect the rate of economic growth!
Thanks for the extract, Gaddeswarup.