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Peasants versus City-Dwellers: Taxation and the Burden of Economic Development

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The poorest of the poor in South Asia are the peasants. They are landless and powerless. There are over 400 millions of them. The machinery of the state is mostly designed to squeeze them for the benefit of the powerful who are, of course, in the cities.

Sah and Stiglitz have written on these matters with remarkable originality. They analyze the long history of such conflicts: the Poor-Law debate in Briton, the pre-Civil War era in the United States, the pre-collectivization Soviet Union, and so on. They capture the main motifs of the conflicts in today's Third World. Their book makes it possible to comprehend various kinds of institutional and policy biases that distort the town and country relationships.

This book is written in the language of professional economists. I hope that these or some other authors will write a book on these topics for broader audiences.