Globalisation and India’s Development

ARC invites to a guest lecture by Dr. Ajit Ghose

Globalisation and India's Development

In the 1980s, India had what might be called growth without development. Although the economy was growing at a fairly rapid rate, the growth process did not generate many "good" jobs and failed to transfer labour from underemployment and low-productivity employment into regular, higher-productivity employment. It was thought at the time that lack of openness was a major reason for this. In the early 1990s, India set out to open its economy, to integrate it into the global economy. The result was a slight acceleration in the pace of growth. But the phenomenon of growth without development persisted. The most recent evidence actually suggests a worsening of employment conditions in the country. How do we explain this? There are two main candidates: past policies have altered endowments so that India's comparative advantage now lies in skill-intensive products; and past policies have created a structure of domestic demand that is biased towards luxury goods.

Ajit K. Ghose holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge. He worked as a Research Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford before joining the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1979. He retired from the post of Senior Economist at the ILO in end-June 2008. Currently, he is a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Human Development (New Delhi) and also at the Council for Social Development (New Delhi). He is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Development Studies (University of Cambridge, UK) and at Wolfson College (Cambridge, UK). He has numerous publications in the areas of agriculture development, employment, inequality, manufacturing, and globalisation.