This paper explores the question of convergence in total factor productivity (TFP) in agriculture across fourteen mdjor agricultural states of India. Using a Tornqvist-Theil index for TFP growth for the period 1973-1993, we find no evidence to support convergence to a single TFP level (a-convergence). After grouping the various states on the basis of their productivity performance, we find that the high-performing states show a gradual movement towards the trend, whereas the low-performing states generally show more volatility. Testing for long-run convergence in levels of agricultural productivity, we find evidence of conditional beta-convergence after controlling for state-specific factors and idiosyncratic year-specific volatility. The results are robust to alternative specifications of tests of unit root in panel data developed recently. (A.N. Mukherjee).shocks such as inflation is still large in the determination of wages and income in the rural areas. There is also enough empirical evidence in the literature to suggest that poverty and inequality are still persistent in rural India in spite of substantial gains in land and labour productivity in agriculture.The overall growth in productivity at the national level can mask significant differences between those states that have progressed rapidly, such as Punjab and Haryana, and those that have lagged behind. Das and Barua (1996) show that there were substantial inequalities in income among the states of India from the beginning of the Green Revolution period until the first half of the 1990s. They use a maximum entropy method to investigate the determinants of the persistence of regional inequality, and find that differences in agriculture and infrastructure are the 0169-5150/03/$ -see front matter 0

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This paper investigates the factors responsible for a drastic decline in the growth rate of labor productivity of the agricultural sector for the 1956–90 period. This investigation is carried out by a newly devised procedure which decomposes the growth rate of labor productivity into (1) the total substitution effect which consists of the effects due to factor price changes and biased technological change, and (2) the TFP effect composed of the effects due to scale economies and technological progress. Based on empirical estimation of the translog cost function, it was found that the total substitution effect contributed to the growth of labor productivity much more than the TFP effect did for the period under question.

This paper analyzes the factor relations of postwar Japanese agriculture to identify the factors which explain a significant decline in labor in the agricultural sector. A nonhomothetic and Hicks-non-neutral trans log cost function is estimated. The results of the decomposition analysis based on the estimates show that biased technical changes and nonhomotheticity together with price-induced factor substitutions play an important role in easing the transfer of agricultural labor to the nonagricultural sectors. The results also suggest that the biased technical change is consistent with the Hicksian-induced innovation hypothesis.