What can we learn from land and financial allocation in India?

Factor Allocation and Growth
 
A central challenge for developing countries is to promote growth by reducing the misallocation of factors of production—labor, capital and land. While there may not be such a thing as a perfectly efficient factor allocation, evidence shows that there are huge gains in growth from reducing factor misallocation. Growth requires more efficient firms to produce more output and use more factors of production. Our past work has shown that land allocation is barely better than random at best, and probably worse than random in India. Put differently, low productivity firms have better access to land and buildings than high productivity firms. Indeed, land and buildings misallocation appears to be at the root of much of the misallocation of output and it accounts for a large share of the observed differences in output per worker in the manufacturing sector.