Livelihood Volatility in the Urban Labour Market: Reflections from India’s PLFS Data (2017-18)

This study aims at capturing the labour market volatility which is conceptualized in terms of the lack of sustainable sources of livelihood round the year. Though we are not able to identify the number of times workers change their jobs, the change in the job status which cannot occur unless the job changes, unravel important findings as retrieved from the quarterly repeated surveys of the same households. Two sets of multinomial logit model, representing labour market outcomes and the number of times of change in the type of employment (job status), and the wage function estimated after overcoming the endogeneity bias, bring out the susceptibility of the lower castes, illiterates and those belonging to the large households. The urban informal economy is subjected to income volatility which is connected to employment instability. In fact, the anomalies of the informal economy are not confined to meagre earnings only; the fluctuations reflect greater vulnerability.

Read More