Reforms are perpetually debated. If there are two areas of reform, which figure prominently in the liberalisation discourse, with strong views on both sides, those are privatisation (or disinvestments) of public sector enterprises and labour market reforms. The argument is that organised labour markets are unnecessarily rigid and thereby, artificially drive up capital intensity and make it difficult for India to exploit the comparative advantage in labour. This volume is about labour markets, but there are also papers in it about the unorganised labour market, accounting for 92% of the labour force. Within the organised segment, flexibility in labour markets is usually interpreted as changes in the Industrial Disputes Act, requiring what is sometimes called, an automatic hire and fire policy. That labour market reform is much more than this narrow interpretation, comes out clearly from this collection of papers. As such, this volume should be of interest to all those interested in policy formulation in India, and researchers and students.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bibek Debroy
Bibek Debroy is Director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (RGICS), Rajive Gandhi Foundation, New Delhi. He is a professional economist and was educated in Presidency College (Calcutta), Delhi School of Economics and Trinity College (Chambridge). He has worked at Presidency College (Calcutta), Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (Pune), Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (Delhi), National Council of Applied Economic Research (Delhi) and as consultant, Department of Economic affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He was also the Director for a project known as LARGE, set up by the Ministry of Finance and UNDP to Consulting Editor with Financial Express. Bibek Debroy's special interests are international trade in particular the WTOI, law reform and the political economy of liberalization in India. He has been listed in many bibliographies and has been a member of several government committees.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR P.D. Kaushik
P.D. Kaushik is a Fellow at the RGICS. He is an engineer, MBA and Ph.D. During his Ph.D., he was awarded Jawahar Lal Nehru Fellowship. He has wide experience of industry and academics. He was also associated with consultancy work for the FAO, Commonwealth Secretariat and World Bank. He is a visiting faculty at leading business schools in Delhi. He has publications on policy issues emerging from electronic commerce and WTO. He has co-authored two books on the WTO.
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