Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste by Diane Coffey & Dean Spears

Author:Diane Coffey & Dean Spears [Coffey, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2017-07-10T06:00:00+00:00

Existing research told us to expect an effect of sanitation on wages in India.

But quantitatively, how big should we expect the effect to be? To answer this question, Dean recruited the collaboration of Nicholas Lawson, now an economics professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal. Nicholas is a labour economist whose research is dedicated to careful quantitative assessments of how best to improve social safety net programmes for workers and their families. Nicholas came to visit Dean in Delhi and in Uttar Pradesh, and together they made a plan to learn about the extent to which childhood exposure to open defecation reduces the wages of adults.

It is not enough to compare workers who were born in places with bad disease environments with workers who were born in places with good disease environments, and merely see if they earn different wages. If their wages differed, it could be because of open defecation. But it also could be because of any number of other differences. Perhaps the labour markets are different – meaning that there are simply more jobs available in places where open defecation was more common. Or perhaps workers in places with less open defecation attended less school. Or perhaps the two places tend to be home to people assigned a different rank in the caste hierarchy. Any of these factors – and more – could make a simple comparison misleading.

Part of a solution is to compare workers who were, in principle, competing against one another for similar jobs but who were exposed to different levels of open defecation in their early years. Most people in India work in the same district where they live. So, Nicholas and Dean decided to compare workers within districts. Studying workers exposed to different early-life conditions within the same district would hold much of their labour markets constant.

Figure 8 is computed using the data from Nicholas and Dean’s research. It presents a basic fact of labour economics: Older workers are typically paid more than younger workers. If you draw a graph of average wages for workers at each age, the line almost always slopes up, and India is no exception. This slope is usually attributed to the fact that older workers have accumulated experience that employers are willing to pay more for. But, in some places the line slopes up more steeply (meaning older workers are paid much more than younger workers), and in some places the line slopes up more gradually (meaning younger workers are earning almost as much as older workers).

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