Growth Dynamics and Gender Wage Inequality in Indian Agricultural Sector: Study across Various Population Hierarchies of Villages

Abstract

This paper studies three important issues of Indian agricultural sector, namely, the determinants of the agricultural wages in India, the extent to which gender inequality is present in it, and the variations in this inequality within various population hierarchies of Indian villages. The paper employs robust regression technique to deal with the presence of outliers and heteroskedasticity. Results suggest that there are four major factors that determine the agricultural wages, namely, non-farm wage factors, accessibility factors, production factors, and individual factors. Gender wage disparity is to an extent of 23% against women in comparison to the men. Furthermore, village growth is detrimental to the agricultural wages in comparison to non-farm wages and female agricultural wages are more disadvantaged with growing dynamics of villages.