Services-Led Structural Transformation and Translocal Householding
论证印度从农业直接跳到服务业的发展路径与高水平的临时循环迁移相互关联且互相强化，并利用空间工具变量证明跨地家庭化促进了迁出地的农业向服务业转型，但可能导致持久的不平衡发展。
This article argues that two distinctive features of India’s development pathway—its agriculture-to-services leap and its high levels of temporary, circular migration—are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. First, we mobilize multiple literatures to show that economic growth led by export services produces a polarized labor market in India’s prosperous cities, drawing rural–urban migrants but failing to provide them permanent footholds. These dynamics reinforce and expand the widespread practice of translocal householding, in which individuals and families straddle multiple locations and labor markets. We then employ an empirical strategy involving a spatial instrumental variable to show that translocal householding also facilitates an agriculture-to-services transition in migrant origins. These findings show that, as households arbitrage their labor across space, their translocality establishes a livelihood system that supports the spatial diffusion of the structural transformation process. However, because economies in migrant-sending regions are organized around local consumption, they are less poised for prosperity than those of India’s metropolitan areas, possibly leading to durable patterns of uneven development. The article calls for further inquiry into the role of translocality in shaping the economic geographies of the Global South, not only in India but in other countries witnessing similar forms of internal migration and structural transformation.