ISAS Working Papers

This paper examines the nature of changing labor markets in India and identifies the severe structural limits of the state in creating plenty of meaningful jobs. The argument is as follows: the instruments of intervention available at the state's disposal are highly constrained due to a variety of structural endogenous and exogenous factors, whose cumulative and combined effect has been to generate a form of late capitalism that does not follow the classical capitalist transition pattern. Instead the uneven development resultant from this type of capitalism is unable to create either the desirable type or high volume of jobs. This late form of capitalism is compressed due to both pre-mature stagnation and leapfrogging in specific sectors and industries and by which the classical or agrarian transition is either incomplete or stalled and thus unable to play its historic role of raising agricultural productivity to motor capitalist industrialization.