Employment crisis and decent work deficits for youth in India

Basit Abdullah () and Kashif Mansoor ()
Additional contact information
Basit Abdullah: Centre for Development Studies
Kashif Mansoor: Centre for Development Studies

Journal of Social and Economic Development, 2024, vol. 26, issue 3, No 2, 734-758

Abstract: Abstract India has a rising proportion of the working-age population driven by a youth bulge. The youth bulge has the potential to productively contribute to the growth of an economy if desired employment opportunities are available in the labour market. The paper presents the structure and nature of employment for youth and identifies the youth labour market challenges with respect to employment generation and quality of employment. We find that employment generated in labour intensive and productive non-primary sectors has not taken place at the required pace. The slow employment generation has affected youth more than adults. There has been an overall job loss in absolute numbers among youth from 2004–2005 to 2017–2018 despite reasonably high economic growth. The challenge of employment quality is as severe as employment quantity in India. There is a predominance of low quality of employment among youth characterized in terms of the lack of access to decent work. Most of the young workforce is informal, trapped in low pay, without job contract, and has less access to social security benefits. The inability of the economy to generate sufficient and decent employment opportunities for the youth will affect leveraging the demographic dividend and has several social and developmental consequences.

Keywords: Youth; Employment; Decent work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40847-023-00294-5 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:jsecdv:v:26:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s40847-023-00294-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40847

DOI: 10.1007/s40847-023-00294-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Social and Economic Development is currently edited by M.G. Chandrakanth, D. Rajasekhar, Anand Inbanathan and S. Madheswaran

More articles in Journal of Social and Economic Development from Springer, Institute for Social and Economic Change
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().