Labour Market Participation in India

Arup Mitra  is a Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi, India. He is currently serving as the Director General of the National Institute of Labour Economics Research and Development (NILERD), New Delhi. His research interests include issues in development economics, urban development, labour and welfare, industrial productivity growth and employment, services sector growth and trade in services, and gender studies. He has published in a number of international and national journals. He worked as a senior researcher at the International Labour Organization (Geneva), was offered a visiting fellowship at the Institute of Developing Economies (Tokyo), held the Indian Economy Chair at Sciences Po (Paris) and was a vising professor at the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University (Japan). The Indian Econometric Society awarded him the Mahalanobis Memorial Gold Medal for his outstanding contributions in the field of quantitative economics. His work has been cited in the  Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics  (Elsevier, 2004) and he has also contributed to the  Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems  (EOLSS),  Mathematical Models in Economics  (Ed. Zhang, W.), developed under the auspices of UNESCO, and to the  Encyclopaedia of Sustainability , Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing. Aya Okada  is Vice Trustee for International Cooperation and Professor of Political Economy at the Graduate School of International Development (GSID), Nagoya University. She holds an M.Phil. in Development Studies from the University of Sussex and a Ph.D. in Economic Development from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research interests include economic and social development, regional planning, education and skills development, and gender and development. Her publications include books such as  Industrial Skills Development: Globalization and Human Resource Development in Developing Countries  (co-edited, 2008, in Japanese), numerous book chapters, and articles in international journals such as  World Development . Dr. Okada was Research Fellow at MIT’s Industrial Performance Center (IPC) in 1997–1998. More recently, she was a visiting scholar at MIT and visiting professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, both as an Abe Fellow awarded by the Social Science Research Council. More recently, she has also played consulting/advisory roles in development projects sponsored by JICA, UNESCO, and the Japanese government.