Collaborative Research: On the Effects of Economic Development on Population Growth

在这项拟议的多层次纵向家庭数据中，将使用1968-1982年期间印度全国4500多户农村家庭的大规模概率抽样数据和1999年期间的新数据，并结合来自政府来源和卫星的补充地区具体数据，全面重新审查经济增长对家庭和个人的收入分配、经济流动性以及家庭的形成和解散的影响。合并后的数据的一个独特而关键的特点是，它们记录了印度的一段时间，这与一项自然实验密切一致，在这一实验中，经济发展的来源--“绿色革命”--对人口是外生的，是可衡量的，并且由于自然条件的原因，具有地理选择性。因此，可以记录由农业生产率增长推动的经济发展是如何对人力资本回报和投资以及其他家庭行为产生不同影响的。这项工作的基本主题是，对个人福利的经济变化评估必须重要地考虑到个人是如何被归类到家庭中的，以及家庭如何通过转移、市场和当地政治机构进行互动。该项目的具体目标包括：(A)更好地了解家庭行为和家庭内部分配；(B)在动态的背景下评估家庭间转移对收入保障和投资的贡献；(C)估计家庭分裂和形成的决定因素，特别侧重于技术变化的影响；(D)评估嫁妆在影响按性别划分的人力资本投资和家庭间资源分配方面的作用；(E)评价地方政府在分配土地资源和其他公共产品方面的作用，同时注意分配标准和效率标准，并特别注意位于共同土地上的森林资源。这些新的调查将基于先前项目工作中使用的新一轮调查数据。新数据不仅将分析的时间范围延长了17年，总时间跨度超过30年，而且提供了特别适合在动态背景下对家庭进行分析的新信息。特别是，新的数据提供了更符合描述家庭和家庭关系的新框架的信息，并将首次将分离出来的家庭包括在小组中，以及关于所有家庭成员的婚姻和家庭分居历史的追溯资料。这些新颖和独特的家庭数据将特别有助于详细探讨家庭和家庭关系，以及这些关系和家庭决定的结果在长期和短期内如何受到经济变化的影响。新数据还将提供关于村庄治理结构的回溯性数据，从而能够在30年内建立一个约250个村庄的村级数据集，用来探讨村庄治理是否以及如何影响家庭间的资源分配、共同土地使用和森林资源的开发。这些独特的数据跨越了很长一段时间，但提供了个人、家庭和家庭层面的细节，因此将为评估增长和发展以及家庭行为的分配影响的理论提供更好的经验基础。

In this proposed multi-level and longitudinal household data from a large national probability sample of over 4500 rural households in India covering the period 1968-1982 and new data covering the period through 1999, merged with supplementary area-specific data from governmental sources and from satellites, will be used to reexamine comprehensively the effects of economic growth on the distribution of incomes across households and individuals, on economic mobility and on the formation and dissolution of households. A unique and critical feature of the merged data is that they document a period of time in India which conforms closely to a natural experiment in which the source of economic development - the "green revolution" - was exogenous to the population, was measurable, and, due to natural conditions, was geographically selective. It is thus possible to document how economic development, propelled by agricultural productivity growth, differentially affected human capital returns and investments and other household behavior.The underlying theme of this work is that the evaluation of economic change on individual welfare must importantly account for how individuals are grouped into households and how household interact through transfers, markets, and local political institutions. The particular aims of the project include (a) the achievement of a better understanding of household behavior and intra-household distribution, (b) an assessment of the contributions of interhousehold transfers to income security and investment in a dynamic context, (c) estimation of the determinants of household break-up and formation, with particular focus on the impact of technical change, (d) an evaluation of the role of dowry in affecting investments in gender-specific human capital and the distribution of resources across households, and (e) the evaluation of the role of local governments in allocating land resources and other public goods with attention to both distributive and efficiency criteria and with particular attention to forest resources situated on common lands.These new inquiries will be based on the availability of a new survey round of the panel data used in the prior project work. The new data not only expand the time frame for analysis another 17 years, for a total span of temporal coverage of more than 30 years, but provide new information particularly suited to analyses of households in a dynamic context. In particular, the new data provide information more consistent with new frameworks describing family and household relations and will include split-off households in the panel for the first time as well as retrospective information on the marriages of all family members and household division histories. These novel and unique household data will in particular permit a detailed exploration of family and household relations and how these and the outcomes of family decisions are affected over the long as well as the short-run by economic change. The new data will also provide retrospective data on the governance structures of the villages, enabling the construction of a village-level data set of approximately 250 villages over 30 years with which to explore whether and how village governance affects the distribution of resources across households, common land use and the exploitation of forest resources. The availability of these unique data spanning a long time-period yet providing detail at the individual, household level and family level will thus provide an improved empirical basis for assessing theories of the distributional effects of growth and development as well as of household behavior.