Employment and global value chain participation: the Indian experience

Abstract

The paper examines the impact of GVC participation and position on overall employment creation and skill composition of the Indian workforce during 1990–2015. Arellano-Bond GMM dynamic panel estimation reveals that the expansion of size of a sector (in terms of higher value added) failed to generate employment opportunities, especially for the educated unemployed. However, stronger backward linkage is found to have labour displacing effect whereas stronger forward linkage has created employment opportunities but for the unskilled workers. Furthermore, the downstream sectors are found to generate more employment opportunities, whereas the upstream sectors are more skill intensive.