Contents: Preface. I. Poverty, inequality and development state in China: 1. Inequality and poverty in China in the post-reform period: an overview/Azizur Rahman Khan. 2. China and the (human) developmental state/Carl Riskin. II. Food insecurity, poverty and employment in India: 3. Food insecurity, undernourishment and poverty in India during the 1990s/Ranjan Ray. 4. Higher growth, lower poverty and higher unemployment: is there a puzzle in the post reform Indian economy?/Sanjay K. Hansda and Partha Ray. III. Poverty, child work, gender and labour: Bangladesh and India: 5. Poverty as a determinant of children's market work and household work in Bangladesh/Shahina Amin, Shakil Quayes and Janet Rives. 6. Gender and labour: post reform scenario in India/Panchanan Das, Byasdeb Dasgupta and Pradip Kumar Biswas. IV. Agrarian issues and reforms: 7. Land tenure reforms: a proposal for alternative peasant social construction/Samir Amin. 8. Agrarian issues in our times : liberalisations and agrarian change in a South Indian agrarian economy/Vamsi Vakulabharanam. 9. Priorities in lending and agricultural credit in India: pre-and post reform scenario/Sadhan Kumar Chattopadhyay. V. Global industrial consolidation, technology constitution and social shaping: Asian perspectives: 10. Price theory and multinational oligopoly: Kurt Rothschild and Stephen Hymer revisited/G.C. Harcourt and P.H. Nolan. 11. Social shaping of India's computer software technology sector: a methodological analysis in terms of actors and networks/Dilip Dutta. Glossary. References.
"This festschrift volume for Professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi dwells on issues often raised in the development debate whether neo-liberal reforms in developing nations have raised inequality and poverty, food insecurity, hindered empowerment of women, aggravated agrarian distress, re-allocated resources for private profitability and facilitated the rise of multi-national oligopoly according inferior status to the domestic industries in the host countries. Most of the issues have been examined on the basis of empirical data drawn from China, India and Bangladesh.
Essays on China concentrate on post-reform issues of inequality across regions and rural-urban locations and its failure to achieve targets of human development while experiencing rapid economic growth. Discussions on changes in policy environment since the early days of the People's Republic of China also constitute the basic themes of the essays, food insecurity, growth-poverty-employment relationship, gender discrimination in the labour market and agrarian distress caused by withdrawal of state support to small farmers growing commercial crops and revision of priority sector lending policy at the cost of small farmers and entrepreneurs the major themes of essays written in the Indian context of post-reform development. In an essay on Bangladesh the poverty issue has been revisited in the context of child work, Agrarian issues have also been raised in an essay where the author proposes an alternative peasant social construction for the dual affirmation of land rights of the state and of the peasant family. In the last two essays authors look far beyond the mainstream tradition to develop an analytical framework for understanding issues relating to the recent rise of multi-national firms and the phenomenal growth of India's software technology."
