International emigration and remittance inflow is not a novel phenomenon for India. The present study examines the factors influencing emigration and size of remittance inflow. It also examines the effect of remittances on the economic wellbeing in terms of expenditure of the recipient households. In India, the remittance inflows are important source of funding for the recipient households in rural India. However, the studies focusing on the impact of international remittances on rural household wellbeing in India are rarely found in the literature. The study is based on the primary data collected from the villages in Ratnagiri District, Maharashtra, India. It uses logit and probit models to analyse the data. The results show a positive association between inward remittances and economic welfare and subsistence of the recipient households. Findings of the study show a strong negative relationship between the education of the household members and emigration.

Drawing on results from a panel of 2778 workers interviewed during and after the 68-day hard lockdown imposed in India, the following study examines the livelihood impact of the pandemic and the extent of subsequent recovery or lack thereof. Focussing specifically on workers located in the informal economy, the study is a useful addition to the burgeoning body of work on the economic impacts of Covid-19 by providing an insight into the employment and earnings recovery of those located at the margins. These findings are spliced across socio-economic groups to showcase the differential impact of the pandemic on different demographics within the informal sector. Our results show that six months after the hard lockdown, one out five persons were still out of work. Conditioned on being employed prior to the lockdown and having lost work during the lockdown, we find that urban respondents, women, workers above 60 and graduates were significantly less likely to recover from the shock. A similar exercise carried out for women workers showed that middle aged women, never married women and women who were not-literate or educated up until primary and middle school were significantly more likely to recover from job loss. Older women, those located in urban areas and Muslim women were on the other hand significantly less likely to recover from the job loss. Earnings on the whole were half of what they used to be prior to the pandemic. Some better off workers shifted to more precarious types of employment. Given the fall in earnings, poorer worker households were forced to borrow and the amount of loan taken was multiple times their average monthly income. In the context of loss in employment and reverse migration, the survey results show a substantial unmet demand for work under the MGNREGA programme even after the lockdown was lifted. We conclude that despite a partial recovery in the subsequent period, the pandemic-induced lockdown has undermined the material conditions for subsistence for a large segment within the informal economy. Moreover, any attempts made to re-imagine what a social protection programme for the informal economy should look like must take into account the segments most susceptible to an economic shock on their livelihoods.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41027-023-00427-8.

Pandemic and online learning have added to barriers to education. Lack of digital access, difficulty in communication with teachers and lack of peer support create major hurdles in learning for a large proportion of the student population. New entry barriers to better jobs, level and quality of higher education, will add to existing social barriers of gender, caste and nepotism. This will perpetuate a vicious cycle of low education and low incomes. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a threshold of level of education for better jobs in India? We find that higher secondary education is a threshold required for entry into good jobs. We observe increasing returns to private investments in higher levels of education and higher returns to education in the formal sector jobs compared to the informal sector. Will deficits in education during the pandemic reduce investments in education? We study these issues mainly using secondary data from the National Sample Office (NSO). The purpose of this short paper is to build research hypotheses regarding the relation between investment in education and employment, which we highlight in the conclusion.

The nature of and the future potential for economic growth will vary across Indian States because of their differences in the rates of demographic transitions. The growing population of the young in some of the States in the east and north of the country, notably Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, opens up a huge economic opportunity. It is also a serious policy challenge-to create new opportunities that meet the rising expectations of the job aspirants. At the same time, for States such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which have an ageing population, there are limits to future growth based on labour-intensive sectors. Across Indian States, during the period between 2005 and 2018, labour absorption into industry, construction and services lagged way behind the increase in the potential supply of workers into these sectors. The mismatch between labour demand and potential labour supply widened after 2012, leading to an increase in unemployment rates and a large-scale withdrawal of women from the labour market. For reviving employment growth, India requires a mix of social, employment and industrial policies. The States should have greater financial and functional autonomy to implement these policies in a way that suit their specific stages of development.

Based on the secondary data taken from Population Census, and the Employment-Unemployment Surveys and Periodic Labour Force Survey of the National Sample Survey, it is found that Indian economy is passing through a critical phase of economic development in which it is likely to lose its demographic advantage. Because, in India while about 4.5 million people wereleaving agriculture every year prior to the Covid-19 pandemic years, the non-farm sectors job was not growing adequately to accommodate the persons leaving agriculture, and the newly educated non-farm job seekers. As a result there was an upsurge in educated youth unemployment (18% and about 24 million) rate, and hence the discouraged youth labour force. On the other hand, an increase in the share (from 8.0 to 10.2%) and growth (3.0-5.1%) of elderly population put a question on the process of harnessing demographic dividend in India. Based on these findings it is argued that an integrated approach of development is necessary to boost the labour force participation of youth and overall population to boost the growth of per capita national state domestic product (NSDP) in Indian states. This could be achieved through the promotion of micro and small enterprises along with infrastructure development along with a systematic emigration and remittances policy.

In the conditions of the democratization of the Ukrainian state, the reform of labor legislation is an objective necessity, about which there are many discussions. The current labor legislation was developed during the existence of strict legal regulation of labor relations, when state property was their economic basis. The relevance of the chosen research topic lies in the fact that the current legislation regulating labor relations is outdated and unbalanced, has problems, shortcomings, conflicts and gaps, and is simply not suitable for regulating this area in a market economy. The present study used a set of general and special methods of scientific knowledge. The purpose of this study is to establish the nature of problems, shortcomings and gaps in the legal regulation of labor relations in Ukraine, identify some of them and find ways to solve them, and formulate proposals to improve existing labor legislation in our country.

The ruling National Democratic Alliance regime in India pushed through three labour codes in September 2020 namely the Code on Social Security; Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code; and the Industrial Relations Code. These alongside the Code on Wages approved earlier in 2019 amalgamate several labour laws. This study is an endeavour towards a critical examination of the Industrial Relations Code, 2020. It engages in a comparative analysis of the various provisions of the Code vis-à-vis the laws which were its predecessors. Some key features of the Code as well as their ramifications are probed. Further, their potential impact on trade unionism and the right to strike is discussed. The relationship between capital and labour is adversarial rather than complementary. This paper argues that reforms in the real sense must seek to balance the interests of both parties rather than that of employers alone.

Eight sister North-East states of India are unique in diverse flora and fauna and manifest distinctive social and ethnocultural identities. Meanwhile, North-East states exhibit common problems ranging from ethnic conflict, insurgency, and secessionist movement, illegal taxing and extortion, and drug trafficking to poor transportation and communication and immigration issues. The region incurs prolonged ethnopolitical turmoil, which left imprints on the migration from this region. The present study examines the level, trend, and pattern of interstate migration from the North-East during 1991–2011 and associates it with prolonged ethnopolitical turmoil. The exodus of workers to the mainland Indian states implies a lack of employment opportunities. Employment elasticity suggests that income growth in North-East states lacks inclusiveness and fails to sensitise the employment opportunities, inducing the workers to migrate from North-East into mainland Indian states. Not only the labour migration but the student migration is also conspicuous, which exhibits the weakness of the educational system. The decades-long ethnopolitical unrest and enforcement of AFSPA of 1958 for more than 60 years caused predicaments of economic developments, employment opportunities, and challenge to the fundamental human rights and social well-being, resulting in people being forced to move out in the 1990s and 2000s.