Output, Employment and Productivity Growth in Indian Manufacturing: a Comparative Study of West Bengal and Gujarat

This monograph provides some empirical results on growth behaviour of output, employment and productivity in manufacturing industries in West Bengal and Gujarat over 1970 to 2002. The empirical analysis proceeds by analysing, first, the contrasting features of overall growth and structural changes between the states. Overall employment structure and the incidence of casualisation of workforce are explored by utilising NSS data of different rounds on Employment and Unemployment Situation in India. By applying the theory of cointegration and vector autoregressive analysis on the ASI data, this study examines the role of manufacturing growth on overall economic growth and also on employment growth in manufacturing in these two states. Stochastic production frontier model has been employed in a panel data frame to provide some empirical estimates of productive efficiency and technical change in the factory sector across two-digit manufacturing industries. The distributional aspect of growth is captured by investigating both the regional and sectoral aspects of pay inequality. A marked dissimilarity in growth pattern and structural changes between West Bengal and Gujarat is observed.