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Productivity & Innovation

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

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Hindu-Muslim integration and firm output in Indian manufacturing: Evidence from a field experiment

Evidence suggests that ethnic diversity can lower firm output due to poor social ties and taste-based discrimination among workers. Based on an experiment in a manufacturing plant in West Bengal, this...

  • Articles

Contract labour and firm growth in India

There is considerable evidence indicating that the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA), 1947 – which made it illegal for large companies to downsize – had a powerful disincentive effect for entrepreneur...

  • Articles

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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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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Articles

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 ...

  • Videos

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...

  • Articles

The promise of technology for women’s employment

The growth of digital labour platforms holds tremendous potential to improve employment outcomes for India’s young, urban population. In this post, Farzana Afridi discusses the challenges in leverag...

  • Perspectives

Mirroring realities: Digital technology through the eyes of women microentrepreneurs

The expansion of markets from physical spaces to e-commerce platforms during the pandemic widened the pre-existing digital gender divide in India. Employing the method of ‘auto-photography’, the t...

  • Notes from the Field

Recent Contributors

Neha

Neha Arya

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Sneha

Sneha Ganguly

CECFEE

Achyuta

Achyuta Adhvaryu

University of California, San Diego

Anant

Anant Nyshadham

University of Michigan

Smit

Smit Gade

Good Business Lab

Jean-François

Jean-François Gauthier

Boston College

Sandhya

Sandhya Srinivas

Good Business Lab

Katherine

Katherine Stapleton

World Bank

View all Contributors

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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...

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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