Indian Journal of Labour Economics最新文献

{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue.","authors":"Sarthi Acharya","doi":"10.1007/s41027-023-00433-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-023-00433-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10088766/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9373994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Harnessing Demographic Dividend Before it is Lost Forever in India.","authors":"Jajati Keshari Parida,&nbsp;S Madheswaran","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00422-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00422-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on the secondary data taken from Population Census, and the Employment-Unemployment Surveys and Periodic Labour Force Survey of the National Sample Survey, it is found that Indian economy is passing through a critical phase of economic development in which it is likely to lose its demographic advantage. Because, in India while about 4.5 million people were leaving agriculture every year prior to the Covid-19 pandemic years, the non-farm sectors job was not growing adequately to accommodate the persons leaving agriculture, and the newly educated non-farm job seekers. As a result there was an upsurge in educated youth unemployment (18% and about 24 million) rate, and hence the discouraged youth labour force. On the other hand, an increase in the share (from 8.0 to 10.2%) and growth (3.0-5.1%) of elderly population put a question on the process of harnessing demographic dividend in India. Based on these findings it is argued that an integrated approach of development is necessary to boost the labour force participation of youth and overall population to boost the growth of per capita national state domestic product (NSDP) in Indian states. This could be achieved through the promotion of micro and small enterprises along with infrastructure development along with a systematic emigration and remittances policy.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9839200/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9374472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Loss, Recovery and the Long Road Ahead: Tracking India's Informal Workers Through the Pandemic.","authors":"Paaritosh Nath, S Nelson Mandela, Aishwarya Gawali","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00418-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s41027-022-00418-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on results from a panel of 2778 workers interviewed during and after the 68-day hard lockdown imposed in India, the following study examines the livelihood impact of the pandemic and the extent of subsequent recovery or lack thereof. Focussing specifically on workers located in the informal economy, the study is a useful addition to the burgeoning body of work on the economic impacts of Covid-19 by providing an insight into the employment and earnings recovery of those located at the margins. These findings are spliced across socio-economic groups to showcase the differential impact of the pandemic on different demographics within the informal sector. Our results show that six months after the hard lockdown, one out five persons were still out of work. Conditioned on being employed prior to the lockdown and having lost work during the lockdown, we find that urban respondents, women, workers above 60 and graduates were significantly less likely to recover from the shock. A similar exercise carried out for women workers showed that middle aged women, never married women and women who were not-literate or educated up until primary and middle school were significantly more likely to recover from job loss. Older women, those located in urban areas and Muslim women were on the other hand significantly less likely to recover from the job loss. Earnings on the whole were half of what they used to be prior to the pandemic. Some better off workers shifted to more precarious types of employment. Given the fall in earnings, poorer worker households were forced to borrow and the amount of loan taken was multiple times their average monthly income. In the context of loss in employment and reverse migration, the survey results show a substantial unmet demand for work under the MGNREGA programme even after the lockdown was lifted. We conclude that despite a partial recovery in the subsequent period, the pandemic-induced lockdown has undermined the material conditions for subsistence for a large segment within the informal economy. Moreover, any attempts made to re-imagine what a social protection programme for the informal economy should look like must take into account the segments most susceptible to an economic shock on their livelihoods.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9984124/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9386552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fifteen Years of India's NREGA: Employer of the Last Resort?","authors":"Swati Narayan","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00396-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00396-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>For the last decade, India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, 2005) has been the world's largest public works programme. This legal entitlement provided employment to 28 per cent of rural Indian households in 2019-2020. After the COVID-19 pandemic, NREGA is increasingly emerging as an invaluable employer of the last resort. However, longitudinal data of implementation in its first fifteen years reveal distinctive trends. On the one hand, since inception, NREGA has rendered greater benefits to women and marginalised communities. But on the other, since 2014 till before the pandemic, the present National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime has reduced NREGA coverage compared to its implementation during the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government which had enacted the legislation. Nevertheless, in light of the pandemic and based on international experiences in public work programmes, there is an urgent need for the expansion of the employment guarantee.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9487846/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"33483000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Persistent Vulnerabilities in the World of Work and Contemporary Capitalism: Some Reflections on India.","authors":"Praveen Jha,&nbsp;Preksha Mishra","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00382-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00382-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The onslaught of COVID-19 has been catastrophic for India's world of work. While it was a bolt out of the blue, its impacts on employment need to be located in the context of a long-term and ongoing structural crisis of (un) employment and systemic vulnerabilities (and subsequent burgeoning of 'labour reserves') that have tended to worsen during the neo-liberal regime. Using the various EUS and subsequent PLFS rounds for roughly the last two decades, the paper seeks to highlight selected aspects of the vulnerabilities and inequities that have plagued India's world of work. These include participation rates, vulnerable employment, composition of workforce and access to certain aspects of decent work such as social security, paid leaves, and written contract. An important issue that the paper investigates is 'income-vulnerability' of the employed at the present juncture. Further, inequities across gender and social groups have also been assessed as regards these variables using the most recent data.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9306421/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40661250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy: The Need for a Multi-faceted Approach.","authors":"Kamala Sankaran","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00398-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00398-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The recent international attention paid to the formalization of the informal economy finds reflection in ILO Recommendation No. 204 concerning the transition from the informal to the formal economy and the Sustainable Development Goals (Target 8.3). There is great diversity within the categories of the informal sector, informal employment, and informal economy in India. This paper examines the category of the 'informal economy' as understood in international instruments as well as in international statistics and maps these onto legal categories recognized within Indian law. The categories of 'employed', 'engaged', and 'work arrangement' used in Indian laws, and their interpretation by the courts, are useful to understand the links between the concepts of work, employment, and livelihoods. The paper also focuses on the diversity of the informal economy, focusing on wage employment, self-employment, including the diverse forms of own-account work and contributing (unpaid) family labour. The categorization of gig and platform workers as own-account or waged workers continues to pose a normative challenge. The regulatory responses for formalization of each segmented category of informal workers and informal enterprises cannot be uniform, and neither do they need to be linked to any particular domain of the law. Moving beyond the extension of social security coverage as the key vehicle for formalization, the paper suggests various entry points through which law and policy can improve conditions of work and protect the livelihood of those in the informal economy as measures to achieve formalization.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9491659/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40376551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Migration from North-East India During 1991-2011: Unemployment and Ethnopolitical Issues.","authors":"Avijit Mistri","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00379-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00379-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Eight sister North-East states of India are unique in diverse flora and fauna and manifest distinctive social and ethnocultural identities. Meanwhile, North-East states exhibit common problems ranging from ethnic conflict, insurgency, and secessionist movement, illegal taxing and extortion, and drug trafficking to poor transportation and communication and immigration issues. The region incurs prolonged ethnopolitical turmoil, which left imprints on the migration from this region. The present study examines the level, trend, and pattern of interstate migration from the North-East during 1991-2011 and associates it with prolonged ethnopolitical turmoil. The exodus of workers to the mainland Indian states implies a lack of employment opportunities. Employment elasticity suggests that income growth in North-East states lacks inclusiveness and fails to sensitise the employment opportunities, inducing the workers to migrate from North-East into mainland Indian states. Not only the labour migration but the student migration is also conspicuous, which exhibits the weakness of the educational system. The decades-long ethnopolitical unrest and enforcement of AFSPA of 1958 for more than 60 years caused predicaments of economic developments, employment opportunities, and challenge to the fundamental human rights and social well-being, resulting in people being forced to move out in the 1990s and 2000s.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9311352/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40661249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making the Right to Social Security a Reality for All Workers.","authors":"Shahra Razavi","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00378-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00378-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The right to social security has strong anchoring in international human rights law and forms a critical component of international labour standards. While social security has sometimes been portrayed as inimical to economic dynamism, there is a much larger body of work that posits a positive relationship between social welfare and economic progress. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed stark gaps in social protection. Workers in the informal economy have been particularly hard hit, as they were excluded from formal work-related protections and were not eligible for social assistance that often targets the very poor and those outside the labour force. Social assistance schemes with flat-rate benefits can be an element of a rights-based national social protection system if their eligibility criteria, benefit levels and modalities are set out in the national legislation, to ensure transparency and accountability. However, social assistance schemes should be part of a broader social protection system, which usually combines tax-financed schemes and social insurance to guarantee a social protection floor and provide higher-level benefits in line with international social security principles. Inspired by a vision that seeks to formalize all economic units, especially micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, and make the right to social protection a reality for workers in all types of employment, the paper points to a number of country examples that have extended social protection by combining contributory and non-contributory elements. This vision is particularly needed at a time when climate change adaptation, digital transition, and other drivers of transformative change call for the formalization of jobs and enterprises, while making it possible for states to mobilize the maximum available resources to build universal, comprehensive and adequate social protection systems that can facilitate inclusive transitions.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9306419/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40661247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Structural Transformation and Employment Generation in India: Past Performance and the Way Forward.","authors":"Amit Basole","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00380-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00380-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Historical experience suggests that a sustained rise in per capita incomes and improvement in employment conditions is not attainable without a structural transformation that moves surplus labour from agriculture and other informal economic activities to higher productivity activities in the non-farm economy. In this paper, I analyse India's performance from a cross-country comparative perspective, estimating the growth semi-elasticity of structural change. Using a cross-country panel regression, I estimate the effectiveness of growth in moving workers away from agricultural and informal activities as compared to other developing countries at similar levels of per capita income. I show that the performance in pulling workers out of agriculture is as expected given its level and growth of GDP per capita, but the same is not true for pulling workers out of the informal sector. I also propose the following five indicators that need to be kept track of when evaluating the growth process: the growth elasticity of employment, the growth semi-elasticity of structural change, the growth of labour productivity in the subsistence sector, the share of the organised sector in total employment and the workforce participation rate. Comparing these indicators across periods, states, regions or countries, allows us to understand which sets of policies have worked better than others to effective improvements in employment conditions. And taken together the indicators allow us to set structural change targets as well as to say whether the current pattern of growth is going to be sufficient to meet those targets.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9288666/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40535576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Specific Human Capital and Skills in Indian Manufacturing: Observed Wage and Tenure Relationships from a Worker Survey.","authors":"Jaivir Singh,&nbsp;Deb Kusum Das,&nbsp;Kumar Abhishek","doi":"10.1007/s41027-022-00408-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00408-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Successive Indian governments have attempted to increase the growth in employment alongside encouraging skill enhancement. Against this background, we empirically explore issues surrounding the investment in specific capital by workers. In particular, we try to discern the presence of specific human capital investment by investigating whether there is a link between tenure and wages and find that there is indeed such a link evident in India. This allows us to infer that it is valuable to have long-term relations between employers and their workers and therefore labour market institutions that support long-term employer-employee relationship need to be encouraged.</p>","PeriodicalId":34915,"journal":{"name":"Indian Journal of Labour Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9734441/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10748773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}