60 Utsa Patnaik closed units with no mobility of labour. But widening income disparities within the same commune, the same brigade, and even the same team is a different matter altogether. As long as the overall growth rate is high and everybody's real income is rising, some increase in disparity can be absorbed by the system : further, the actual increase in consumption dis-parties is less than the potential increase arising from income disparities owing to the availability of collective health, education and cultural facilities. (One reflection of this is the recent marked increase in savings deposits in banks which in rural areas have risen four-fold during 1979 to 1983.) But if the growth rate slows down then increasing income inequalities are very likely to generate a more vocal opposition to the new economic policies than has hitherto been the case. Secondly, there is a danger that clandestine, disguised contracts in use of land and even i'n the use of labour power may emerge over time with the development of markets in final outputs, unless explicit counter measures are adopted'by the State. Reports are heard that there are cases of allotted land being given over by a household to workers of other households who till it for a consideration, while the allottee finds more lucrative full-time employment in private 'sideline' activities such as selling eggs on the urban market. The logic of commodity production, once accepted, is difficult to confine to final output alone; it should be stressed, however, that these cases are still a far cry from the development of'markets' as we know them, and it would certainly be incorrect to see in these relations any direct revival of capitalist production. What they do reflect is an increasing mobility of rural household workers between occupations, which is now permitted by the increased flexibility of the institutional structure. One of the hitherto unavilable occupations is private enterprise in the tertiary sector; some peasants who in the past would have engaged exclusively in agricultural occupations can now if they wish set up business retailing goods in town markets, running food stalls, providing some form of transport, etc. Apart from the immediate household members several other individuals can be 'associated' with such enterprises, without constituting 'hired labour' in the capitalist sense. There has been a phenomenal growth of such 'individual enterprises' in the tertiary sector in recent years, providing mainly services of various kinds. (The number of'individual labourers' in towns, for example, went up from only 0.15 m. in 1978 to 3.4 m. in 1984; the data for individual labourers in rural areas, however, is not separately available.) Nevertheless, the contribution of private enterprise to the gross domestic product remains very small at below 5 per cent, the overwhelmingly large share coming from the State and collective organisations (including the communes, renamed 'townships', in rural areas). The large-scale and continuing experiments with reforming the economic structure, in which China is engaged, merit close and continuing study. The very basic and interesting issue of to what extent commodity production and growth of exchange is compatible with the development of a socialist economy is the question which is posed in China today. Our