Sir Arthur Lewis was was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1979. His best-known work is the dual-sector model of developmental economics, which is also known as the “Lewis model.”
- In addition to being the first Black person to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific discipline, Lewis was also the first Black student at the London School of Economics (LSE), the first Black teacher at the LSE.
Lewis model
- Lewis argued that an expanding manufacturing sector could absorb much of the surplus labour in agriculture and other “subsistence” sectors.
- All it had to do was pay wages just high enough to make men leave the family farm. So long as the higher subsistence wage levels matched the value of the additional output that was produced, the factories would keep hiring workers.
- For Lewis, industrialisation was a virtual inevitability for countries with surplus labour populations; he specifically mentioned India.
- However, the model hasn’t panned out in India the way Lewis envisaged . Agriculture employed about two-thirds of India’s workforce till the early nineties. The accompanying chart shows that share falling from 64.6% to 48.9% between 1993-94 and 2011-12. But not much of it was courtesy of manufacturing, whose share in employment rose marginally, from 10.4% to 12.6%, during this period.
