Liberalisation and Jobless Growth in Developing Economy

Liberalisation and Jobless Growth in Developing Economy

This paper explains why a developing country may experience a jobless growth in the organised sectors during liberalised regime within the framework of a three-sector mobile capital version of Harris-Todaro type general equilibrium model describing rural-urban migration with agricultural dualism and a non-traded intermediate input. Main findings support the fact that as a consequence of different trade reform policies, organised sectors have experienced increased competition from foreign markets which has forced them to lax labour laws, with the freedom to switch towards more capitalintensive techniques of production, resulting retrenchment of relatively less productive workers and ending up with a jobless growth under the liberalised regime. These results are particularly interesting for their contradiction to the predictions of the standard Harris-Todaro model.