Abstract
The 2016 India Employment Report demolishes the myths of both ‘demographic dividend’and ‘jobless growth’in the India growth story. But it recognizes that the growth of decent, productive employment is too slow even to absorb the annual increment of new workers in the workforce, let alone eliminate the huge backlog of open unemployment and low productivity underemployment. This paper argues that this challenge is a man-made problem, the consequence of a range of dysfunctional policies that have a strong anti-employment bias. Moreover, a longstanding elitist bias in education policy has pre-empted the provision of quality basic education without which the bulk of the workforce cannot be suitably skilled for decent, productive employment. The paper suggests that these dysfunctional policies are attributable to a fractionalized polity and India’s soft state, which stands in sharp contrast to the hard states seen in the dramatically successful East Asian model of guided capitalism.
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Notes
However, a ‘demographic dividend’ of sorts may still arise from declining fertility leading to smaller family sizes and higher per capita incomes.
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Acknowledgements
This is a revised version of the Radha Kamal Mukherjee Memorial Lecture delivered at the 58th Annual Conference of the Indian Society of Labour Economics, Guwahati 24 November 2016. The author wishes to reiterate that it was a great honour, and a humbling experience, to have been invited to give the lecture in the memory of Professor Mukherjee. The author would like to thank the Society and the Conference President, Dr. Ajit Ghose, for giving him the opportunity to speak on the subject of workers and their employment conditions, a subject very close to Professor Mukherjee’s heart. The author is grateful to Ajit Ghose, Pranab Bardhan, Shankar Acharya and Vijay Joshi for their comments on an earlier draft. All views expressed in the paper are solely of the author.
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Mundle, S. Employment, Education and the State. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 60, 17–31 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-017-0084-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-017-0084-1
Keywords
- Growth
- Employment
- Unemployment
- Underemployment
- Education
- Skill
- Productivity
- Dysfunctional policies
- Soft state
- Hard state
- India
- East Asia
- Guided capitalism