The Economics of Caste

Caste is an important determinant of most economic decisions in India. However, despite this role of caste in economic behaviour, it is only recently that caste has begun to be studied in depth in economics. In the last decade, economists have entered the debate on the role of jatis in the Indian economy. This chapter discusses how, by using tools that were developed for different contexts as well as by developing specific ones for the study of the caste system, the contribution of economists has greatly broadened our knowledge of the role of caste in the Indian economy-in particular, the quantitative extent of this importance. With a decrease in data treatment costs, the quantitative analysis of jati data is ‘democratizing’, and economists are now increasingly able to study the role of jati with such publicly available data or via efficient ways of treating administrative data.