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Productivity & Innovation

Share of manufacturing in India’s total employment: No mean performance

  • Perspectives

Patent protection in India: Impact on innovation, pricing and competition

When stronger patent laws were introduced in India, there were fears that it would lead to higher prices without substantial gains in innovation. This article provides evidence that stronger patent pr...

  • Articles

Subcontracting linkages in India’s informal economy

Subcontracting relationships with larger firms are considered key to facilitating the growth of informal enterprises. Using four rounds of National Sample Survey data on Indian informal manufacturing ...

  • Articles

Bringing work home: Flexible work arrangements as ‘gateway jobs’ for women

Millions of women stay out of the workforce despite having a desire for paid work, often because available opportunities are incompatible with traditional norms of household roles. Based on an experim...

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DP-WEE Panel Discussion: Status and rights of platform and gig workers

A virtual panel discussion was organised by the Digital Platforms and Women’s Economic Empowerment (DP-WEE) programme, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to understand the status and l...

  • Videos

Supporting women weavers: Learnings from producer companies

The lack of market demand and low earnings, as well as competition from power looms, has led to declining participation of artisans in India's handloom industry. In this note, Dang et al. share some i...

  • Notes from the Field

Collecting labour market statistics to study the platform economy

Although India has emerged as a leader in digital labour market platforms, there is a dearth of data about the gig economy. Neha Arya describes the efforts taken by the CMIE to collect data on platfor...

  • Articles

A review of women’s engagement with digital labour market platforms

Summarising some findings from ongoing work being done as part of the DP-WEE project, Sneha Ganguly highlights how the emergence of digital labour platforms have the potential to improve women's acces...

  • Perspectives

How worker investments can fuel productivity in India’s manufacturing sector

In the second article in the Ideas@IPF2023 series, Adhvaryu et al. synthesise some facts on India’s declining manufacturing productivity and variations across states and industries. They examine exi...

  • Perspectives

AI and services-led growth: Evidence from Indian job adverts

Using a new dataset of online vacancies from India’s largest jobs website, Copestake et al. document near-exponential growth in the demand for artificial intelligence-related skills in the services...

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Implicit costs of factor allocation for Indian firms

Looking at variations in factor misallocation across states, Chaurey et al. measure trends in factor adjustment costs incurred by firms between 1999 and 2014. They find that adjustment costs for labou...

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The gendered employment effects of mobile internet access in developing countries

In the third post of I4I’s month-long campaign to mark International Women’s Day 2023, Goldberg and Chiplunkar look at 3G internet coverage in 14 countries, and find that access to mobile internet...

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Bringing skilling and productive employment closer to women

On International Women’s Day, Farzana Afridi considers a key issue in the creation of good jobs for women – the provision of skilling. She discusses the lack of physical and financial access to sk...

  • Perspectives

Formalisation of informal manufacturing enterprises in India

Employment in India’s organised manufacturing sector has grown rapidly since 2004. This article finds that about 15% of this growth can be attributed to the formalisation of previously informal ente...

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I4I@10 | First Ashok Kotwal Memorial Lecture: The future of development

What is the 'fourth' fundamental law of capitalism? Will capital ‘inherit the earth’? Has the pandemic quickened the intuitive appeal of the capital-labour substitution? Should sovereign funds be ...

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Creative destruction and catch-up growth in India

In this post, Peters and Zilibotti compare the size of firms in India and the US, and find that the 90% of firms in India have four employees or less, and attribute it to the absence of creative destr...

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Most Popular Productivity & Innovation Posts

The impact of robotisation on the world economy: A forward-looking review

Robots have long existed in human imagination and only recently in the real world. The baggage of past imagination often intrudes into our understanding of how real robots will affect our economic liv...

  • Explainers

Tripura’s bamboo sector: Potential and challenges

About a third of the total area of Tripura is covered by bamboo, and bamboo has emerged as a key thrust area for the state’s industrial development. Based on a field visit that was undertaken to stu...

  • Notes from the Field

An offline alternative for Aadhaar-based biometric authentication

While decision on the constitutionality of Aadhaar by the Supreme Court of India remains a matter of speculation, it has become abundantly clear that most of the use cases for Aadhaar-based biometric ...

  • Perspectives