Productivity In Indian Manufacturing

This volume comprehensively captures trends in productivity and its determinants in the post-reform period for Indian manufacturing. It provides an up-to-date survey of different methods employed in measuring productivity and their applications across organized and unorganized sectors, including food, beverages, furniture, gems, chemicals, petroleum and rubber, metals and minerals, paper products, publishing, textiles, etc. The essays examine the uneven impact of economic reforms and growth on the performance of the manufacturing sector. This will be especially useful to students and scholars of economics, business and management, policymakers and governmental agencies, particularly those interested in Indian economy and manufacturing.

The importance of industrialization as a means of achieving rapid growth and prosperity has long been recognized in the thinking on development strategy for India; but the country's industrial potential has been far from fully exploited.

What caused the increase in industrial productivity in the marketing sector of India in the 1980s after nearly two decades of industrial stagnation? This book examines the causes of this turn around, including improvements in planning and performance of infrastructure sectors, as well as changes in industrial and trade policies. The study emphasizes the need for policy reform at the microeconomic level combined with strong measures designed to enhance a macroeconomic environment which is conducive to growth.

Productivity and wages plays an important role in the economic development and ultimately determines the standard of living in the country. In a developing economy like India the wage policy is facing a real conflict between the need of the workers for larger consumption and the demand of the economy for higher rate of capital formation. The increasing productivity and its linking with wages is the best option available. The book examines the relationship between productivity and wages in selected industries of organised manufacturing. In this endeavour, the book examines (a) The trends in productivity; (b) The trends in distribution of productivity gains; (c) The trends in factor compensation (wages and rate of return). Contents: Introduction and Problem Setting, Data and Methodology, Wage Productivity Relationship Theoretical and Empirical Evidence, Productivity Trends in Selected Industries, Trends in Distribution of Productivity Gains, Trends in Wages and Earnings, Wage-Productivity R

The empirical evidence linking economic reform in developing countries with gains in productivity and efficiency is both limited and inconclusive. Using large firm-level data collected by the Reserve Bank of India, this book examines the impact of reform on productivity and competition for the Indian manufacturing sector in the eighties. Relying on econometric estimates of pre- and post-reform productivity growth, the study finds evidence of significantly higher productivity growth rates after the mid-eighties both at the aggregate and two-digit sector levels. The author seeks corroborating evidence by developing a framework that enables him to simultaneously estimate economies of scale, a measure of optimal labour utilization and the mark-up of price over marginal cost as an indicator of competitiveness. Though he finds evidence of better labour utilization, there is no indication of reduced market power or any significant departure from constant returns to scale in the post-reform period. He concludes that even the limited reforms of the eighties led to productivity gains which were achieved largely through better resource use.

Starting in the late 1970s, the Indian authorities implemented a series of reforms aimed at exposing the economy to greater competition and at liberalizing key aspects of economic activity. This paper investigates productivity trends in India's (registered) manufacturing sectors during the 1980s and 1990s. The main findings of the paper are (i) labor and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in total manufacturing and many of the component sectors since 1980 were markedly higher than that in the preceding two decades, although the extent of the acceleration in TFP growth depends critically on the underlying assumptions about factor elasticities and the assumed structure of the production function; (ii) productivity growth for total manufacturing as well as for many subsectors picked up further after the 1991 reforms; and (iii) classification of the best performing sectors and the weakest performing sectors, based on comparative TFP, remains robust to changes in underlying assumptions.

Most estimates of Indian manufacturing productivity find a slowdown in the 1990s. This has puzzled analysts, given that 1990s reforms were deeper and wider than the 1980s reforms that raised the growth rate of the Indian economy by 2 per cent points. This paper tests the hypothesis of the J curve of Productivity and Growth following major liberalization and finds it to be broadly supported by the data: Technological obsolescence, gradual adoption of new technology and learning by doing result in negative effects on measured productivity.