Labour and manufacturing

Understanding the bottlenecks to manufacturing and labour productivity growth in India

Syllabus

Academic Papers

  1. Can Labor Regulation Hinder Economic Performance? Evidence from India (2003) — Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess
  2. NCAER Paper III — Achyuta Adhvaryu, on productivity and capital in small Indian firms
  3. The Contractualisation of Workforce in India's Factories Continues — CEDA, Ashoka University
  4. Informal, Tradables, and Employment Growth in Indian Manufacturing — CEPR VoxEU
  5. India Labor Edition — Shruti Rajagopalan and Shobana Shah, The 1991 Project
  6. Chapter on East Asian industrialisation — Oxford Academic
  7. NBER chapter on South Korea's economic transformation
  8. A Rural Non-Farm Sector in Taiwan — World Bank
  9. Paper on China's manufacturing-led industrialisation — ScienceDirect
  10. Paper on Vietnam's manufacturing transition — HAL Science

Legal Statutes & Codes

  1. Factories Act, 1948
  2. Industrial Disputes Act, 1947
  3. Minimum Wages Act, 1948
  4. Apprentices Act, 1961
  5. Industrial Relations Code, 2020
  6. Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020

Reports

  1. Economic Survey, chapter on India's "missing middle"
  2. OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2025: Productivity in SMEs and Large Firms
  3. White Paper on India's labour compliance burden — TeamLease RegTech
  4. India's Services Sector: Insights from Employment Trends and State-Level Dynamics — NITI Aayog
  5. Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, Report 2019 — Labour Bureau
  6. Report on manufacturing wages relative to other sectors in Asia — ILO
  7. Women, Business and the Law 2026 — World Bank

Articles & Blog Posts

  1. Measuring Manufacturing — Data for India
  2. Factories — Data for India
  3. India vs China in Manufacturing: Which Country Is Right for Your Product? — India2West
  4. Can India Be the Alternative for Companies Moving Out of China? — The Industry Outlook
  5. Viet Nam Adapts, India Caps — Prosperiti
  6. Labour Flexibility for the Win — Prosperiti
  7. No Room to Grow — Prosperiti
  8. Lower the Bar, Increase the Earnings — Prosperiti
  9. 42: Week Ideas — Prosperiti
  10. Double or Nothing — Prosperiti
  11. Dangerous Paternalism — Prosperiti