Productivity and Agricultural Real Wage in Bangladesh: 1959-60 to 2012-13

Abstract

The trend of the real wage of agricultural labourers in Bangladesh during the last half a century was influenced by two opposing forces: technological changes that raised the productivity of the farm land through high yield crops and multiple cropping, which also raised the productivity of labour, and a rapid growth of agricultural labour supply working in the opposite direction. This resulted in the stagnation of real wages for nearly four decades. Only when the addition to agricultural labour supply became persistently negative around the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, did the real wage show a trend increase.