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Saibal Kar

Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, India, and IZA, Germany

IZA World of Labor involves a very different form of presenting research in labor, development, and many other issues. As pursued by World of Labor, it becomes one of the most challenging tasks to comprehend various policy issues associated with one or two key research findings. World of Labor travels the depth of research-to-policy and offers a unique experience to all

IZA World of Labor role

Author

Current position

Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor of Economics, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India

Research interest

Labor economics, international economics, and development economics

Website

https://www.iza.org/person/6179/saibal-kar

Positions/functions as a policy advisor

Wages and working conditions of critical workers in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Laos, for ILO-Geneva; School Education in West Bengal, for Government of West Bengal, India; Longitudinal skill development among youths in India for ICSSR-India; Child Marriage in West Bengal, for UNICEF; Urban Local Bodies in West Bengal; for Government of West Bengal, India.

Past positions

Visiting Professor: Amsterdam School of Economics and Department of Economics, University of Amsterdam; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, HWWI, Germany; Santa Fe Institute, NM, USA; Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur; Indian Institute of Management, Indore; etc.

Qualifications

PhD Economics, Northern Illinois University, 2002

Selected publications

  • "Trade within OECD Countries and Skill Premia." World Economy 2025 (with S. Ray).

  • "Does Skill Emigration Hurt Unskilled Workers? Theory and Cross-Country Evidence." International Migration 62:3 (2024): 41–56 (with S. Marjit).

  • "Expert habitat: a colonization conjecture for exoplanetary habitability via penalized multi-objective optimization-based candidate validation" European Physical Journal Special Topics 230 (2021): 2265–2283 (with L. Khaidem, S. Saha, A. Mathur, and S. Sahawith).

  • "FDI and business internationalization of the unorganized sector: Evidence from Indian manufacturing." World Development 83 (2016): 340–349 (with H. Beladi and M. Dutta).

  • "MFN Tariff Rates and Carbon Emission: Evidence from Lower-Middle-Income Countries." Environmental and Resource Economics 64:3 (2016): 493–510 (with D. Majumdar).

article(s)

  • The labor market in India since the 1990s Updated

    Despite higher output per worker and moderate unemployment, wages and job quality have not improved proportionately

    Indraneel DasguptaSaibal Kar, October 2025
    The Indian economy entered an ongoing process of trade liberalization, domestic deregulation, and privatization of public sector units in 1991. Since then, per capita output has increased significantly, while the overall unemployment rate has remained moderate. However, labor force participation rates fell sharply, though recovering for women since 2020. Youth unemployment remains high, an overwhelming proportion of the labor force continues to work in the informal sector, labor movement out of agriculture is slow, and there is little evidence of a sustained rise in wages for either unskilled rural or factory workers.
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  • Do economic reforms hurt or help the informal labor market?

    The evidence is mixed on whether and how economic reforms benefit informal labor

    Saibal Kar, June 2016
    The evidence is mixed on whether informal labor in developing countries benefits from trade and labor market reforms. Reforms lead to higher wages and improved employment conditions in the informal sector in some cases, and to the opposite effect in others. At a cross-country level, lifting trade protection boosts informal-sector employment. The direction and size of the impacts on informal-sector employment and wages are determined by capital mobility and the interactions between trade and labor market reforms and public policies, such as monitoring the formal sector. To guarantee best practice policymakers need to take these interdependencies into account.
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