Jayati Ghosh

Globalization, Export-oriented Employment for Women and Social Policy: A Case Study of India

This chapter seeks to examine the Indian experience with respect to women’s employment in export-oriented manufacturing industry in the era of globalization. It also considers the role of social policy in providing work and survival security to women, by first evaluating the effects of state policy, and then considering other attempts to ensure minimum security to women workers. The first section sets out some of the issues with respect to the feminization of labour in export-oriented employment, and situates the discussion in the context of the experience of the high-exporting East Asian economies in the 1990s. The evidence pointing to a fall in the share of women in export-oriented manufacturing employment even before the onset of the East Asian crisis is considered, and the possible reasons for it are discussed. With this background, the next section briefly highlights the important trends with respect to aggregate female employment in the Indian manufacturing sector over the 1990s. It is argued that much of the use of female labour in export production in India has been in informal and unorganized workplaces, including home-based work, with associated implications for pay, working conditions and consequently also for social policy. The cases of Export Oriented Units (EOUs) and Export Processing Zones (EPZs) are then taken up in the third section, with specific attention to what such employment has meant for job, material and social security.

How Feasible Is a Rural Employment Guarantee

There is no doubt that employment generation has emerged as not only the most important socio-economic issue in the country today, but also the most pressing political concern. The mandate of the recent elections is clear on this: the people of the country have decisively rejected policies that have implied reduced employment opportunities and reduced access to and quality of public goods and services.

Intersectoral Terms of Trade, Agricultural Growth and the Pattern of Demand

The movement of intersectoral terms of trade in India is generally regarded as an issue of crucial importance in affecting patterns of growth and income distribution both in agriculture and in industry. While there is substantial (and often acrimonious) debate on the determinants of agriculture-industry terms of trade as well as their precise impact on economic welfare and the growth process, the significance of such movements tends to be taken for granted by all protagonists. In this paper a slightly different position is taken, in which intersectoral terms of trade are assigned a less important role in determining economic processes. Some of the arguments can be starkly presented as follows: In general the government in India has little power in determining such terms of trade, which emerge not because of the differential lobbying power of particular classes but because of the workings of political economic variables such as labour productivity in industry, the real wage and industrial mark-up and import prices. This view contests both urban bias and rich farmer lobby sets of theories. Secondly, it is argued that terms of trade movements (trends) in themselves have not affected either the real incomes of the rural poor or rates of agricultural investment and growth. Thirdly, it is suggested that the causes of industrial growth or stagnation are not to be found in such terms of trade movements, although the latter may affect the pattern of industrial demand and therefore the allocation of investment. These arguments and others are elaborated below. The first section describes the movement of agricultural-industry terms of trade since the early 1950s and isolates three major phases. Various explanations are considered, and a detailed consideration is made of the factors affecting terms of trade in the latest phase. In the second section the question of the impact on agriculture is taken up, in terms of how the rural poor as well as cultivators who are net sellers are affected. The