Towards a Comprehensive Index of Labour Law Reform and Ranking of States

Bhaskar Dasgupta

Arthaniti: Journal of Economic Theory and Practice, 2023, vol. 22, issue 2, 181-205

Abstract: Since the pioneering paper by Besley and Burgess (2004) claimed to have found a positive relationship between flexible and pro-employer labour regulations with manufacturing sector performance, there has been an increasing pitch among policymakers to rationalise India’s complicated labour laws. Several state governments have since undertaken significant reforms in their respective labour law regimes. During the recent pandemic-induced lockdown, some states have gone to the extent of temporarily suspending labour laws to kick-start the economy. The Government of India has also recently consolidated the fragmented labour laws by integrating them into four functionally arranged Codes. But the regulatory measure developed by Besley and Burgess, the very basis of their conclusions, has been criticised on the ground of narrow coverage, methodological inconsistency, misclassification of amendments, etc. This article, therefore, attempts to construct a comprehensive Index by mapping state level-amendments in five important labour legislations over the seven-decade period from 1949 to 2017 and coding those amendments. The article is organised as follows: After the context-setting introductory section, the second section summarises the existing evidence on the relationship between labour regulations and manufacturing sector performance in India. The third section discusses the limitations of Besley–Burgess Index. The fourth section briefly mentions the research direction post publication of Besley–Burgess paper. The fifth section develops a comprehensive Index, and it discusses how it improves the BB Index. The sixth section concludes the article. JEL: J3, K3

Keywords: Labor law; labor reform; labor policy; labor economics; manufacturing output; manufacturing employment; labour code India; legal reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0976747921989149 (text/html)

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:sae:artjou:v:22:y:2023:i:2:p:181-205

DOI: 10.1177/0976747921989149

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Arthaniti: Journal of Economic Theory and Practice
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().