Where are the jobs? Estimating skill-based employment linkages across sectors for the Indian economy: An input-output analysis

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to identify the sectors of the Indian economy that are able to generate different types of skilled employment (both directly and indirectly) through an estimation of their employment linkage effects with respect to varying levels of skills, using the Input–Output technique. The contribution of this paper lies in its redefining ‘skill’ by combining three types of education - general, vocational and technical – for arriving at four types of skilled employment categories—low, low-medium, medium-high and high skilled. The paper incorporates these four types of skilled employment into an Input–Output framework, using the World Input–Output Database for estimating the forward and backward employment linkages with respect to four different skill types for India for 2004–05 and 2011–12. The estimation of these employment linkage effects is critical for identifying the key employment-generating sectors of the Indian economy characterized by varying levels of skill. Moreover, a comparison of these linkage effects for two time-periods at varying levels of skill across sectors helps understand changing nature of employment structure over time, and how it varies across sectors.