This paper discusses the nature of regulation and policy regarding stock exchange ownership in India. It was completed well before the report by the SEBI constituted Bimal Jalan committee on the same subject. Interestingly, there is virtually no overlap between the two reports. Both SEBI and the Jalan report have asked for comments and discussion. Let the debate begin!

This paper examines the pattern of unemployment and wage growth in India for the last twenty five years. The paper uses the NSSO data on employment, unemployment and wages to examine some controversial propositions e.g. that despite economic reforms, unemployment rates increased or that the 1990s were characterized by “jobless” growth, or that the introduction of reforms in the 1990s led to a sharp deceleration in the rate of growth of agricultural wages. This examination leads to results at a wide variance with the conventional wisdom. Rather than a large slowdown as claimed by several recent studies, real wage growth in the 1990s nearly doubled its earlier pace. Unemployment rates were found to be stable for the 1990s and to have sharply come down by 2003. Employment growth did slow down in the 1990s, but this appears to have been in response to a sharp slowdown in the growth of the potential labor force i.e. the growth in the number of people in the labor force age group, 15-59 years. Thus, instead of a job scarce economy, one strong conclusion of this paper is that India is transitioning from a labor surplus economy to one with lesser surpluses and emerging labor scarcities.