Sectoral Compositions of Output and Employment in India: Are We Moving Towards Jobless, Job-loss or Job-enabled Growth?

Abstract

Indian economy, after maintaining a very low growth rate in the pre-reform phase, experienced high growth rate of its income in the post-reform phase. But the sparking growth rates in India after the onset of the liberalisation policy has questioned its sustainability in terms of sufficient employment generations. The present study aims to find out whether the aggregate economy and the sectors within it are moving towards jobless, job-loss or job-enabled growth for the period 1973–2018. The study thus calculated the output elasticity of employment in total period and phase-wise periods, and obtained that the values of the output elasticity of employment show no sign of sparking employment growth like that of the income. The average values of the elasticity of employment lie mostly less than half which signify the emergence of jobless growth. In some years, there are job-loss growths as well, mainly in industrial sector. Hence, it can be inferred that the Indian economy is not going in the right directions so far as employment opportunity is concerned; putting a big question on attaining the sustainable developmental goal. JEL Classification: J21, J64, O10