77% of India lives on less than 50 cents a day
Interesting, though this proves that the competition has been for skilled labour (of a certain type). There is an development econ theory (who came up with it I can’t recall) that states that the export of skilled labour from developed to developing countries actually increases inequality in both areas, increasing the value of individuals with skills that can’t be exported (in the developed world), and increasing the separation between skilled and unskilled labour in the developing world. The main issue is if health, social conditions and lack of education limit the prospect for advancement, economic growth, even if it is in IT and highly technical fields, will simply reflect existing class and economic conditions.
“NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Seventy-seven percent of Indians — about 836 million people — live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world’s hottest economies, a government report said.
The state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) said most of those living on below 20 rupees (50 US cents) per day were from the informal labor sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty.
“For most of them, conditions of work are utterly deplorable and livelihood options extremely few,” said the report, entitled “Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector,” seen by Reuters on Friday.
“Such a sordid picture co-exists uneasily with a shining India that has successfully confronted the challenge of globalization powered by economic competition both within the country and across the world.”
Around 26 percent of India’s population lives below the poverty line, which is defined as 12 rupees per day, said officials.
Economic liberalization since the early 1990s has created a 300 million-strong middle class and led to an average annual economic growth of 8.6 percent over the last four years, but millions of the country’s poor remain untouched by the boom.
According to the report, based on data from 2004-2005, 92 percent of India’s total workforce of 457 million were employed as agricultural laborers and farmers, or in jobs such as working in quarries, brick kilns or as street vendors.
The report said the majority of those working and living under “miserable conditions” were lower castes, tribal people and Muslims and the most disadvantaged of these were women, migrant workers and children.
“This is the other world which can be characterized as the India of the Common People, constituting more than three-fourths of the population and consisting of all those whom the growth has, by and large, bypassed,” said the report.
The NCEUS report, which was presented to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday, recommends the government provide social security benefits such as maternity and medical expenses as well as pensions to people working in the Unorganized sector.”
The nerd in my downloaded my thesis and rooted around for that author you’re referring to. Here’s the paragraph from my paper:
“[Albert] Berry notes a final problem with the Stolper-Samuelson theorem when applied to the real world. He posits that activities (such as factory work) which are shifted from a source country (such as Canada) to a host country (such as Mexico) are less skill-intensive than most activities in the skilled-labour-abundant source country, and they are more skill-intensive than activities in the unskilled-labour-abundant host country. As a result, the concentration of skilled jobs (relative to the country norm) increases in both the source and the host country , decreasing the returns to unskilled labour in both cases. In other words, the wage differential between skilled workers and unskilled workers increases in both cases, exacerbating inequality.”
The reference is Berry, Albert. “Confronting the Income Distribution Threat in Latin America.” In Berry, ed., Poverty, Economic Reform, and Income Distribution in Latin America, 9-42.