29 May, 2006

The Licence Raj

In lieu of a proper post, I'm going to point you at an article about India on the BBC news website, written by one Kaushik Basu. He asserts that employment regulations in India, designed to combat unemployment by making it difficult to lay off workers, have had the perverse effect of slowing employment growth. he maintains that this has happened because risk averse employers are loth to take on workers that they can't easily get rid of should times change.

I think the article has something going for it, and comparisons with the recent attempts to change employment law in France might be instructive. At the same time, I am curious as to what the guy says squares with the commercial and sci-tech boom India has recently experienced.

1 comment:

Andrew Sherman said...

This seems like some American who wants other countries to be like the US. But plenty of European countries do fine with strict employment laws (e.g. the Netherlands). Also I have never heard of any US company hesitating to hire Indian workers becasue of employment laws. So it all sounds a bit theoretical to me.