The relative efficiency of the price support of rice compared to the fertilizer subsidy policyboth competing for scarce budgetary resourcesis evaluated in the paper. An analytical framework is developed to obtain measures of the evaluation criteria. The results indicate that the fertilizer subsidy policy is more efficient than the price support policy in increasing production. Sensitivity tests with respect to some important assumptions do not change the basic conclusions. Distributional implications also tend to favour fertilizer subsidy policy. One implication of the results is that, for any reduction in the budgetary burden of subsidy, the government should explore the price support programme before reducing fertilizer subsidy.
The apathetic attitude towards self-cultivation resulting from the social contempt for manual labour, alleged by many social scientists in South-Asia does not fully explain the existence of tenancy in Bangladesh, where a major portion of land in the tenancy market comes from resident households cultivating a part of their holding by themselves. Other factors mentioned in the literature, e.g., the level of natural risks and the wage also do not explain much of the variation in the incidence of share tenancy. This paper argues that in a monsoon dominated rice agriculture such as Bangladesh the nature of property distribution can substantially affect the existence and regional variation of tenancy, because it can influence the relative advantages of ownership cultivation with wage labour and cultivation through share tenants. The hypothesis has been tested with cross-section data at both macro and micro level.
The behavioural pattern of Bangladesh labour force is characteristically rural, agrarian, bearing distinct marks of age-sex-regional differentials: inter-censal comparisons reveal no significant rural-urban redistribution or its re-structuring among fields of economic activity during 1961-74. The expected male working life compares favourably with the pattern prevalent in selected developing countries, despite a heavier toll of mortality. Estimated statistics of male labour force dynamics reveal that 71.64% of the entries occur by age 15, death claims 55.6% of the annual depletion below age 55, whereas 53.5% of the retirements occur at age 75 and above. The estimated labour force replacement ratio implies that for every 100 depletions, 275 new entries or 175 net additions take place annually. The current back-log of un-and under employed labour force is estimated at around 9.5 million. The socio-economic-geo-demographic realities make it inevitable that vast majority of the surplus labour force will have to be productively employed within a rural set-up. Basic changes in production relations is to be brought about by building socio-economic infrastructure that will engender small family norm from work-force point of view by gainfully employing that adult working population through optimum exploitation of its productive potentials. A comprehensive policy framework for Bangladesh should incorporate the essentials of an integrated labour force and population policy taking cognizance of the inter-relationship of the economic-demographic variables that regulate the demand and supply of labour force on both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
Government-sponsored innovation insurance could be used as a policy to offset possible undesirable income distribution effects associated with a fertilizer-intensive high yielding-variety strategy for agricultural development. Unequal income distributions are intensified if wealthy farmers accept profitable innovations while poor farmers do not, and such adoption patterns have been observed in some areas around the world. It has been suggested that one cause of this is the unwillingness and inability of poorer farmers to bear the risks associated with innovation. Crop insurance plans have been suggested as a measure to offset these risks. The mechanics of such a plan along with a method for basing insurance premiums on a limited amount of experimental data are discussed in this paper.
