Job Creation and Poverty Reduction in India: Towards Rapid and Sustained Growth

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Rapid growth since 1980 has transformed India from the fifteenth ranked economy in nominal US dollars to the twelfth largest in the world in 2003. When income is measured with regard to purchasing power parity, the Indian economy occupies fourth place, after the United States, Japan, and China. Along with growing incomes, India’s increasingly outward orientation and the growing optimism about its economy has led to a surge in international investors interest. At the same time, evidence suggests that income inequality is rising and the gap in average per capita income between rich and poor states in growing. This book of collected articles provides an in-depth treatment of growth and employment issues in India. It reviews India’s long-term growth experience, the emerging constraints and challenges, and the way forward for sustaining rapid growth along with more and better employment. Specifically, the book identifies ways in which the investment climate can be further improved to raise productivity and reduce the cost of doing business, thereby promoting domestic and foreign private investment. It looks at the growth and productivity challenges in agriculture and suggests policies that will help raise farm productivity and incomes. Higher farm productivity and incomes along with more and better non-farm jobs will reduce poverty at a faster pace than in the recent past. It explains the reason for the low overall employment elasticity of past growth and why there has been limited expansion of good jobs, and concludes by suggesting reform options for increasing employment. This book will be of considerable interest to economists, social scientists, policy makers, and scholars.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sadiq Ahmed

Sadiq Ahmed is the Sector Director of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit of the World Bank. He was educated at Dhaka University, the London School of Economics, and Boston University. He taught briefly at Dhaka University, was a Research Economist at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, and then joined the World Bank in 1981. At the World Bank he worked in many countries including Egypt, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and former Yugoslavia, before moving to the South Asia region. He served previously as Country Director for Pakistan and Afghanistan and Chief Economist for the South Asia region. Since October 2006, he also concurrently manages the South Asia Finance and Private Sector Development Department. His research interests are in areas of macroeconomic policy, public finance, trade, and development. He has written and published extensively. His last book, Explaining South Asia's Development Success: The Role of Good Policies was published by the World Bank in 2006.