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Program

Broken Ladders? Labour Market Inequality in Indonesia and India

Lecture by Prof. Kunal Sen, UNU-WIDER, Helsinki and Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK

The event will be held in English. Indonesian language interpretation and Indonesian sign language interpretation will be available.

About the Sadli Lecture

Since 2007, the Institute for Economic and Social Research (Universitas Indonesia) and the Indonesia Project (The Australian National University) have jointly organized the annual Sadli Lecture series to broaden understanding and stimulate debate among students, academics and policy makers of the key economic policy challenges faced by Indonesia. It is named in honour of the late Professor Mohammad Sadli who was one of Indonesia’s most influential policy maker and economist during his lifetime. The annual Lecture is based on a commissioned paper on Indonesia in comparative economic perspective for the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies.

The 18th Sadli Lecture will be held on Wednesday 8 May 2024. Professor Kunal Sen will present a paper entitled: Labour Market Inequality in Two Asian Giants: Indonesia and India Compared. The paper will discuss the dynamics of worker transitions between formal and heterogeneous informal work in Indonesia and will compare it to other countries including India and Vietnam.

This year’s lecture

As globalization and technological advancements reshape the contours of economies worldwide, understanding the nuances of labor market structures becomes paramount. In this year’s lecture, Prof. Kunal Sen presents his research titled Broken Ladders? Labour Market Inequality in Indonesia and India. This lecture offers insights gleaned from a rigorous examination of the labor landscapes of these two nations.

Abstract: We examine the nature of labour market inequality in Indonesia and India, using a common conceptual approach, drawing from the Job Ladder framework. In the framework, we differentiate between self-employment and wage-informal and between formal, upper tier informal and lower tier informal jobs. We find that both countries have a large proportion of workers in lower tier jobs, though the importance of wage-employment is larger in Indonesia. There are more workers in formal wage-employment in Indonesia than India. There are also sharp disparities in the earnings of workers in different tiers of the labour market in Indonesia and India, and there is limited evidence of convergence of the earnings of the lower tier informal workers to that of formal workers. We also find that gender, location and educational level are important correlates of work status in both countries. Female, urban and less educated workers occupy the lower tiers of the labour markets in the two countries.

About Prof. Kunal Sen

Kunal Sen is Director of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU – WIDER) in Helsinki, Finland, since 2019. He is also professor of development economics at the University of Manchester (on leave) and Research Fellow at IZA Institute of Labour Economics (Germany). Professor Sen is a leading international expert on the political economy of growth and development. He has performed extensive research on international finance, the political economy determinants of inclusive growth, the dynamics of poverty, social exclusion, female labour force participation, and the informal sector in developing economies. His research has focused on India, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. He received his PhD in economics from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (USA). His latest publications include The Job Ladder: Transforming Informal Work and Livelihoods in Developing Countries (and edited volume) and Varieties of Structural Transformation Patterns, Determinants, Consequences.

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