2 - The Vain Search for Universal Generalizations: 1. The Relevance of Economic Inequality

Summary

One of the few important socio-economic generalizations which may safely be made about rural tropical economies is that a significant degree of economic inequality always exists within any rural community in which cash circulates. This inequality may be so pronounced that the economic behaviour and motivations of the poorest farmers are entirely different from, even the mirror images of, those of the richest. Yet the economists' need for generalizations relating to all farmers in the village necessarily ignores this essential fact. This means that contrary to appearances the village community as a whole, not the household, is effectively the unit of investigation. I shall justify my ‘inequality generalization’ in Chapter 6. In this chapter I try to expose the confusion resulting from ignoring village inequality by reference first to a recent textbook; then to an attempt by two economists to verify various hypotheses by means of fieldwork; and finally to the work of some world-renowned development economists.

The textbook is Agriculture and Economic Development by S. Ghatak andK. Ingersent (1984), in general a respectable work which may come close to achieving the authors' ambitious aim of being ‘essential as a main text for courses on development economics and agricultural economies’. I start with Chapter 2, ‘Structure and Characteristics of Agriculture in LDCs’, in which (pp.5 et seq.) the authors examine the main attributes of ‘traditional agriculture’, defined as ‘the characteristic farming type in countries where agriculture is the dominant employer (including those who are self-employed)’.