An impact assessment of India's job guarantee: exploring the gap between theory and practice
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2022
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Abstract
In capitalist economies, unemployment has always been a structural and unresolved problem. In this sense, the study of employment policies represents a contribution to addressing this issue. The Job Guarantee (JG) is a public option for jobs that offers employment opportunities to every citizen ready, willing, and able to work. Focusing on further exploring the JG, this research is structured in two pillars. First, to examine and systematise the theory and underlying impacts of the JG proposition advocated by Pavlina Tcherneva, Randall Wray, and other authors from the Keynesian tradition. Second, to study in detail a real-world JG experience: its context, impacts and challenges, being able to grasp to what extent it corresponds to the theoretically expected impacts of a JG implementation. The Indian case was selected since the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) can be considered one of the largest and most ambitious employment generation programmes in the world. The assessment of MGNREGA’s performance reveals it is still far from what is expected from a JG in the theory. Its performance certainly leaves a lot of room for improvement. More investment in the infrastructure of poor localities is needed to expand the programme’s socioeconomic transformative power in the wages level, unemployment reduction, poverty alleviation, inequalities easing and well-being
Description
A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economics and Finance, University of the Witwatersrand, 2022