Employment, Education and the State

Sudipto Mundle

The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 2017, vol. 60, issue 1, No 2, 17-31

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Growth; Employment; Unemployment; Underemployment; Education; Skill; Productivity; Dysfunctional policies; Soft state; Hard state; India; East Asia; Guided capitalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 I28 J08 J21 O20 O25 O43 O53 P16 P47 P52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.1007/s41027-017-0084-1

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