Title: Compressed Capitalism and a Critical Reading of the State’s Employment Challenges
Abstract: InCompressed capitalism thisState chapterEmployment D’Costa critically examines both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of India’s employmentEmployment challenges to assess whether the Indian stateState is in a position to make a dent in India’s growing employmentEmployment deficit. This is in spite of the efforts made in creating the world’s largest employmentEmployment program in the countryside. Using a political economy framework, he offers an institutional perspective as to why plentiful good jobs are hard to come by in India despite the recent high rates of economic growthGrowth, economic . He argues that the deeply dualistic employmentEmployment structure with a relatively small share of highly paid tradeable servicesTradeable services jobs and a vast pool of insecure informal sectorInformal sector jobs are a result of “compressed capitalismCompressed capitalism ” that contributes to India’s uneven developmentUneven development . Compression arises from a stalled agrarian transitionAgrarian transition , stateState -sponsored leapfroggingLeapfrogging of select sectors within the broader truncated industrialization process and a persistent petty commodity producer (PCP) sectorPetty commodity producer (PCP) sector . Both institutional and structural legacies in the context of contemporary capitalist dynamics constrain an agrarian transitionAgrarian transition and instead encourage capital and technology bias in industry, thereby sustaining an expansive PCPPetty commodity producer (PCP) sector sector. The chapter shows that notwithstanding the government’s employmentEmployment goals they remain unrealistically lofty not just because of stateState incapacity but also due to the structural imperatives of global capitalismCapitalism that substantially limits the policy space in a deregulated and liberal economic environment. At the minimum, to accomplish the employmentEmployment goals, the stateState needs to be recast differently, which is more in line with rebalancing the stateState –business relationship in favor of employmentEmployment -driven policies.
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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