Economics Seminar（2013-15）

Topic:Food Prices, Wages, and Welfare in Rural India
Speaker: Hanan Jacoby ( CV attached)

Affiliation: The World Bank

Time: June 28, 2-3:30pm
Location: Guanghua Building 2,Room217

Abstract
This paper considers the welfare and distributional consequences of higher relative food prices in rural India through the lens of a specific-factors, general equilibrium, trade model applied at the level of the district. Nominal wages for manual labor, both within and outside agriculture, rose faster in rural districts growing more of those crops with large producer price run-ups over the 2004-09 period. Taking into account such wage gains, rural households across the income spectrum would benefit from higher agricultural commodity prices. Conventional welfare analyses that assume fixed wages and focus on households' net sales position lead to radically different conclusions.

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