Minimum Wage Policies and Their Effects in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective

Uma Rani

The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 2017, vol. 60, issue 1, No 3, 33-55

Abstract: Abstract India was one of the first developing countries to introduce the Minimum Wages Act in 1948 and it is still considered to be an important piece of labour legislation. However, the Act is only applicable to a small proportion of workers. This has resulted in intense academic and policy debate over the past decades about having a meaningful wage policy and a binding national minimum wage, which is applicable to all workers. This is especially important as the growth rates have been quite high over the past decade in India but income inequality has remained quite high. A number of developing economies like Brazil, China have been able to seize the opportunity of high growth rates and implemented a meaningful and enforceable minimum wage system. This paper makes an attempt to look at minimum wage policies and institutions in developing economies and the role they have played in providing a decent wage floor and securing a minimum living standard for low paid workers and their families. The paper also explores the policy lessons that can be learnt for improving the minimum setting mechanism and enforcement within the Indian context.

Keywords: Minimum wages; Income inequality; Informal employment; Labour market; Trade unions; Collective bargaining (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J46 J51 J52 J53 J58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41027-017-0077-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ijlaec:v:60:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s41027-017-0077-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/41027

DOI: 10.1007/s41027-017-0077-0

Access Statistics for this article

The Indian Journal of Labour Economics is currently edited by Alakh Sharma

More articles in The Indian Journal of Labour Economics from Springer, The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().