[I am not at all well read in this area but...]
1) Kerala's colonial legacy might be compared to Cuba's colonial legacy - large plantations with a "proletarianized'" work force, well educated and politically mobilized population by regional standards.
2) In Kerala's case this helped lead to high investments in basic education, basic health and a number of other "basic needs" areas. Many point to the recent political movements as having pushed this (see Jim C's post) but one should also point out that plantation export industries facilitate tax mobilization (if the political inclination is there). In any event much of Kerala's human investment was locally financed, facilitated by India's structure of state financing for these sectors.
3) But basic human needs are not expensive to meet (just politically difficult) and the "big" money for economic transformation could not be mobilized locally (again, think of Cuba with its dependence on sugar plantations and tobacco). And, as Jim points out, "big" money was not going to come from the central govt. The limited achievements in basic human needs deserve serious praise and make a big difference to the people affected. They also have a high "rate of return" economically and socially. But, in themselves, they can't transform and economy.
4) BTW, I am assuming that by "equality" you meant in terms of basic human needs. Income equality in Kerala is nothing to greatly boast of. The Gini coefficient is right on the national average (although the Gini is horribly misleading due to the fallacy of averages). From my own limited visits to the state one certainly sees less of the destitution one sees in other parts, and that is appreciated. And of course less of the new-new rich who would find it provincial and aren't from the South. But my sense is that the inequality between the typical worker or peasant and the local elite is about the same as elsewhere in India.
5) A philosophical digression: more and more I ask myself how much ANY *currently available* growth strategy affects the long long run. How many countries have dramatically changed their "place" in the economic hierarchy from a hundred years ago (or in some cases two hundred years)? Admittedly, I am thinking of a fairly big band and a long time frame. There has been great excitement over spurts (remember when Japan was poised to overtake the U.S.) but then people drop back. There have been big lags (colonialism for S. and E. Asia; devastation from war or political collapse) but then people catch up. Is there an enormous weight of history (hysterisis, path dependency, whatever) in capitalist international hierarchies?
Paul
At 08:42 AM 11/29/2004 -0800, you wrote:
Why hasn't equality in Kerala generated more economic growth? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Response Jim C: As someone who has lived and taught in Kerala for several years and as someone who can read, write and speak Malayalam fluently, I take exception to this summary assertion or predicate that there is significant equality (presumably in distributions of wealth and income) prevailing in Kerala. I have seen Western academics, often leftists, go on a kind of "Potemkin Village" tour of Kerala and then come back to write about Kerala as some kind of beacon or shining example of equality and socialism standing out in the middle of the social formation of India.
First of all, the inequalitites in Kerala are also glaring (less than in other parts of India but glaring nonetheless). Some of the more glaring manifestations of grossly unqual distributions of wealth and income are less manifest visibly because of more extensive practices of communal sharing and communal cohesion that prevail mostly in the rural areas leaving people to appear visibly better off than they really are.
Next, there is the historic relationship with the central governments going back to Emergency Measures (and farther back than that even), the historic assaults on the Naxalites, regional tensions and jealousies etc that resulted in the south, particularly Kerala, parts of Madras, Tamil Nadu and Andra Predesh getting only the scraps from central government disbursements and being left isolated out of central government development programs.
There is also the historic concentrations and roles of CPI and CPM in Kerala and alternating CPM versus Congress-I provincial governments that caused the central governments to leave Kerala and parts of the south out of any comprehensive development programs on the national level as forms of revenge when they brought CPM in as the state government.
Further, although the inter-party and inter-faith forms of violence have not been as pronounced in Kerala as in the rest of India, class, skin color/tone, caste, and gender still play important roles in perpetuating social divisions that interfere with physical, human and social capital formation. Further, there is the issue of Indigenous Peoples such as the Dalits, in extensive numbers in Kerala and in the south who remain poor, marginalized, locked into Indigenous and "Scheduled Caste" colonies and exploited and whose talents are not brought into the development processes.
I could go on with this but this should suffice for the moment.
Jim C.
