This paper critically reviews the growing literature on the relationship between India’s supposedly ‘restrictive’ labour laws and poor performance on a range of industrial and social indicators. I first summarize the main claims of this literature, and the construction of the indices that...

This paper offers a critique of recent empirical research on the impact of labour regulation on industrial performance in India. It begins with a review of earlier studies that tried to infer the effects on manufacturing employment of amendments made by the central government to the Industrial...