Jobless Growth: A District-Level Analysis of Tamil Nadu 2001-05 (Statistical Data‪)‬

The Study The phenomenon of jobless growth is identified with high growth in value-added with low growth in employment. It is also associated with the hypothesis of job displacement implying that the net creation of employment is either negligibly small or even negative (i.e. a decline) as job creation in some regions/industries is offset by job losses in others. In this context, the study of sub-national regions at the level of a state and at its further disaggregation in to districts is useful for focused policy attention aimed at achieving balanced regional development. This paper presents the findings of a district level data analysis on the organised manufacturing units in the state of Tamil Nadu (TN). The study is confined to the first quinquennium of the new millennium (2001-05) in view of the availability of data for this period. The results are expected to reveal the impact of reforms initiated in the early years of 1990s having allowed a reasonable gap of time period for adjustment. The job creation during the period in OMS should ideally be compared with the corresponding trends in their unorganised counterpart viz. the unorganised manufacturing sector (UMS) (1). This has, however, been presently constrained by the non-availability of data for the UMS for 2005-06 to permit a comparative analysis of the growth therein for the two time points (2).