Policy Watch: Growth with Employment – April 2019

One of the themes on which we at RGICS work is “Growth with Employment”, and this edition of Policy Watch has four articles from this theme.

We start off with an infographic showing a very interesting phenomenon: when we look at economies across the world, we notice that female labour force participation is very high among the poorest countries, lower among middle-income countries, and again high among the rich countries. The female labour force participation is especially low in India, compared to its peers.

Our cover article is a look at the structural issues with employment in India. Over the past many years, we have seen growth happen without a commensurate increase in jobs; increasing informalisation, even within the formal sector; and drops in labour force participation that might render our ‘demographic dividend’ a ‘demographic crisis’ instead. This article surveys the employment scenario and suggests some high-level solutions. The second article examines how successful the ‘Mudra’ scheme has been. Our final article focuses on Rajasthan: how can it achieve not just higher growth, but also more jobs.