Accelerators of India's Growth - Industry, Trade and Employment: Festschrift in Honor of Bishwanath Goldar

This book offers a collection of distinguished contributions that identify current growth accelerators in India, and suggest policies and strategies to make India’s growth more sustainable and inclusive. The papers are divided into three sections, the first of which focuses on issues related to industrial growth in India. The discussions include India’s industrial development (manufacturing, construction and mining); role of manufacturing; global value chains; and of environment in industrial development. In turn, section II deals with issues related to trade and FDI as accelerators of India’s growth. The respective chapters explore the changing patterns of trade, impacts of technology, and spill-over effects of FDI, to name but a few. Lastly, the third section discusses employment-related issues like measurement of labour input, the dichotomy of the Indian labour market, the nature of firms and employment generation, and impacts of technology on employment. Given its scope and focus, the book offers an invaluable resource for researchers and policymakers alike.

Suresh Chand Aggarwal retired as a Professor and Head of the Department of Business Economics, University of Delhi South Campus. He is currently a Senior Fellow, ICSSR affiliated to Department of Business Economics and is associated as a Lead Researcher on labour in an RBI-funded project at the Centre of Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics, on the India KLEMS database. He was earlier associated with the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) as a Senior Consultant. His main research interests are in applied econometrics, labour economics, industrial economics and development economics, areas in which he has published extensively in national and international journals, as well as three books.

Deb Kusum Das is an Associate Professor in the department of economics at Ramjas College, University of Delhi. His main research fields are productivity and growth in India, jobs and the labour market, and empirical international trade. He received his Ph.D. from the Delhi School of Economics and received the EXIM Bank IEDRA Award 2004 for his doctoral dissertation, “Some Aspects of Productivity and Trade in Indian Industry”. He is the co-founder of South Asia Economics Students’ Meet – a platform for undergraduate economics students in South Asia. He is also associated with ICRIER (Delhi) as an External Researcher.

Rashmi Banga is a Senior Economic Affairs Officer & Officer-in-Charge of the unit on Economic Cooperation and Integration among Developing Countries (ECIDC), Division of Globalization and Development Strategies (GDS), UNCTAD, Geneva. She is also a Former Advisor and Head of Trade Competitiveness at the Commonwealth Secretariat, which provides policy support to more than 30 countries. She has worked as a Senior Economist in a DFID-funded UNCTAD project that provided support to the Ministry of Commerce, India, in its trade negotiations. Prior to these engagements, she was an Associate Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India, where she taught for nineteen years. She received her doctorate from Delhi School of Economics, specializing in development economics, international economics and econometrics. She has published extensively in refereed journals on digital issues, international trade and FDI. Her current areas of research include South–South cooperation, digital issues, assessment of free trade agreements, and global and regional value chains. She was honoured with the Export-Import Bank of India’s International Economic Development Research Award, and has received two gold medals from the World Bank’s Global Development Network for her research on globalization and development.