Industry, Labour and the State

Deepita Chakravarty and Indranil Bose
Additional contact information
Deepita Chakravarty: Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Begumpet, Hyderabad, India. Currently Sir Ratan Tata Fellow (2010–11), Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom. Email: deepita@gmail.com
Indranil Bose: Political Science, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, India. Email: boseindranilcal@gmail.com

Journal of South Asian Development, 2011, vol. 6, issue 2, 169-194

Abstract: Despite the pursuit of similar industrial policies during the post-1990s, Indian states have revealed divergent outcomes in industrial growth. Such divergence suggests different levels of policy implementation which itself is a result of the interplay of formal and informal institutions, historically shaped. We try to ex-plain this divergence in the context of the evolution of state–business relations in West Bengal, a coastal state in Eastern India, and unique among Indian states not only by virtue of being ruled by a Leftist regime for an uninterrupted 34 years (1977—May, 2011), but also by having witnessed a turnaround of sorts in the outlook of the former government towards private capital within this period. Our findings suggest that it is the peculiarity of institutional behaviour that determines the policy outcomes in the state. The rigidities in political as well as economic institutions in the state are prompting us to look at West Bengal as a classic case of ‘institutional stickiness’ leading to ‘path dependency’.

Keywords: Formal and informal institutions; institutional stickiness; path dependency; India; West Bengal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097317411100600202 (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:soudev:v:6:y:2011:i:2:p:169-194

DOI: 10.1177/097317411100600202

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of South Asian Development
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().