The aim of all fascistic governments is to disempower the people; and the Modi government is no exception. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) which promised one member in every rural household a maximum of 100 days…
The latest World Employment and Social Outlook Report (update for September 2024) from the International Labour Organisation highlights some disturbing trends. Importantly, it identifies a significant decline and then stagnation in the share of labour income in GDP, for the world as…
The “demographic dividend” that was so eagerly anticipated in India more than a decade ago has already become a demographic disaster. India’s burgeoning youth population is achieving higher levels of education, and then entering a labour market that simply does…
The fundamental issue raised by Hollywood writers when they had gone on a strike against being replaced by artificial intelligence, somehow receded to the background after the resolution of that particular conflict; but it remains a fundamental issue. Much has…
A Distinction is drawn in economics between demand-constrained systems and resource-constrained systems (which for simplicity and symmetry we shall call supply-constrained systems). In the former, an increase in output can occur if there is a rise in aggregate demand without…
Interest in India’s almost unique success as a services exporter in global markets persists. India’s services export receipts rose from $95.8 billion in post-crisis year 2009-10 to $341.1 billion in 2023-24. Close to one half (47 per cent) of those…
The unemployment situation is worse today than it has ever been in post-independence India. There are two distinct elements that have contributed to this situation. One is the fact that the output recovery from the fall caused by the pandemic-linked…
There has been much excitement recently at the supposedly significant recent increase in work participation rates in India, which is being heralded as a sign of the success of the current government’s economic policies. How significant is this increase in…
In an economy like ours where the work-force is not neatly divided into “the employed” and “the unemployed”, and instead there is massive and growing casualisation of work, measuring unemployment is a tricky business. It necessarily means asking a person…
The latest Annual Report of the Periodic Labour Force Survey, covering July 2022 to June 2023, has some interesting results. On the face of it, there seems to be some improvement in the labour market, as expressed in the declining…
