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Pro-Poor Growth in India: What do we know about the Employment Effects of Growth 1980–2000?

Working papers

The aim of this Working Paper is to investigate the extent that the economic growth that has occurred in India is pro-poor. We do this by assessing various quantitative and qualitative aspects of the employment that has been generated, specifically: employment elasticities of growth; labour productivity and wage rates; job security (casualisation and multiplicity); and access. For economic growth to generate the kind of employment that contributes directly to poverty alleviation, it must be in sectors that have relatively high elasticities of employment (numbers of jobs created per unit of economic growth); workers must share in the benefits of increased labour productivity through increased wage rates; it should not only be casual, part-time employment at the expense of regular, full-time jobs; and the jobs created must be relatively unskilled in order to be accessible to the poor. Our focus is on trends in rural areas because this is where most poor people live and work.

S. Mahendra Dev