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Recent Employment Trends in India and China: an Unfortunate Convergence?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Chandrasekhar, C. P. Ghosh, Jayati |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | Both China and India, considered generally to be the “success stories” of globalization with relatively high growth rates in output over last two decades or so, have experienced slower expansion in employment, especially in the organized sector. Moreover, the bulk of new employment is in lower productivity activities under uncertain and often oppressive conditions. This paradoxical situation has characterized both the countries essentially during the period when they have opened their economies to trade and investment. The major factors behind this are changes in the pattern of demand for goods and services in the developing countries as well as adoption of labour-saving and productivity-enhancing technologies in the production process. The authors strongly argue for a change in the policy regime in which generation of good quality employment is the most critical variable. Another important requirement of this strategy is public expenditure, especially in the social sectors. I. INTRODUCTION It is now commonplace to regard China and India as the two economies in the developing world that are the “success stories” of globalisation, emerging into giant economies of the 21st century. The success is defined by the high and sustained rates of growth of aggregate and per capita national income; the absence of major financial crisis that have characterised a number of other emerging markets; and substantial reduction in income poverty. These results in turn are viewed as the consequences of a combination of a “prudent” yet extensive programme of global economic integration and domestic deregulation, as well as sound macroeconomic management. These supposed success stories have therefore been used to argue the case for globalisation and to indicate the potential benefits that other developing countries can reap, as long as they also follow “sensible” macroeconomic policies. Further, both China and India are seen as success stories in terms of changing employment patterns, which are seen as heralding a major shift in the international division of labour. Thus China is typically described as becoming the “workshop” or “factory” of the world through the expansion of manufacturing production, and India as becoming the “office” of the world, in particular because of its ability to take advantage of IT-enabled service sector off-shoring. It is worth considering how far this view is justified by recent internal changes in employment structure in the two countries, and this paper will examine this more closely. However, the main argument of the paper is that both China and India, despite the similarity of the current international hype about their future economic prospects and also despite their obvious differences, face rather similar economic problems at present especially with respect to the labour market. In both countries, the strategy of development is delivering relatively |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.isleijle.org/ijle/IssuePdf/8c64b06f-8ea1-4ad5-81aa-2b80355619d1.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
