Dr. Arpita Mukherjee, professor at ICRIERdelivered the welcome address. Gladys Lopez- Acevedo, lead economist at World Bank gave a brief presentation of the report“Exports to Jobs- Boosting the Gains from Trade in South Asia”, addressing the general issues characterizing the South-Asian countries. The issues taken up by her included high population growth of almost 60%, magnitude of informal jobs immensely exceeding that of formal jobs and related issues. She expressed that the trade to GDP ratio have came down from 55.8% to 41.1% from 2012 to 2017.Daniel Samaan, senior economist at ILO stated that the solution for these was the main thrust of the report, and emphasized on enhancement of export in South Asian counties. In order to increase export three policies have been suggested in the report, which areIncrease the scale of exports, Change the composition of exports to help the disadvantaged workers and Change the composition of workforce to help the disadvantaged group.

Amitabh Kant, CEONitiAyog spoke about Global Value Chain and the need to have single objective to focus on. He stressed on the improvement required in the quality of jobs available in India. He also made special address to the MSME sectors to help exports.Manish Kumar, MD-CEO, NSDC shared inputs regarding government’s policies to encourage skilled workers by giving marginally high wage rate. He also stated that large percentage of workers are skilled but not certified. Ms. Sabina Dewan, ED of Just Jobs network threw light on strategies for job creation and workforce development.

During the course of the panel discussion several new debatable issues emerged like ‘Should India focus on its huge domestic market or on exports only’? ‘How should the composition of exports be formed?’ Trade deficit is a problem featuring South Asian countries, the issue of ‘how to increase exports in this scenario?’ also cropped up.

The illuminating exchanges concluded on the note that exports undoubtedly can increase jobs in a country but we also need to consider a host of other specific aspects to handle the problem of job scarcity in South Asian countries.