Chaitali Sinha

Recent domestic and international incidents-including fatal industrial accidents, severe climate-driven heat stress on garment workers, and widespread wage and safety violationsunderscore persistent vulnerabilities in global manufacturing and infrastructure. In response to these ongoing challenges and the shifting dynamics of global supply chains, India has overhauled its regulatory framework by consolidating 29 outdated central statutes into four unified labour codes. While these sweeping reforms aim to reduce bureaucratic hurdles, boost operational flexibility to attract foreign investment, and formalize emerging sectors like the gig economy, they have simultaneously drawn sharp criticism from trade unions concerned over potential rollbacks of fundamental worker protections. In this light, this study reviews the impact of new labour codes and talks about its state wise implementation. Moreover, we also focus on GAIL (India) Limited and attempt to find out whether the Maharatna Company is making best use of India's ongoing Labour reforms and the New Labour Codes through streamlined regulatory compliance, as the consolidation of multiple archaic acts into four unified codes reduces administrative overhead and minimizes legal disputes. By adopting standardized definitions like uniform wage structures and clear fixed-term employment guidelines, GAIL can enhance workforce flexibility, operational predictability, and corporate governance. Ultimately, this approach fosters a more harmonious and productive industrial relations environment across its energy projects.

Country-specific institutional quality is one of the traditional factors of location choice of multinational corporations. However, the related literature for a long time has ignored the effect of the health system of the economy on attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). This study is an attempt to bridge the gap in the related literature and focus on the joint impact of country-specific institutional quality and health on FDI inflows for a panel of 44 developing countries over the period 2000−2022. The hypothesis of the study suggests that countries with strong institutional quality and good quality of health would attract more FDI. On the contrary, countries with low quality health levels and quality of institutions will struggle to bring FDI into the country. The results of the model strongly support our hypothesis. Our results are robust to alternative measures of the quality of health in the country. From a policy point of view, countries are expected to enhance the quality of health and institutions in the country to attract more FDI. JEL Classification: F21, F23, C33, H51, I18

This study tries to investigate the cross-country variations in infrastructure development among different sets of countries with varying institutional rankings, over time, by building five infrastructure indices. Along with building the total/composite infrastructure index, four other (energy, ICT, finance and transport) sub-indices are also built in this study. The strength of our study lies in the fact that we not only find variations in the total infrastructure development but also within the sub-indices. We have introduced the role of country-specific Institutional quality and inflow of FDI empirically in this regard to determine the cross-country variance in infrastructure development. The core hypothesis of our study is that countries that receive a good amount of FDI inflows will have impressive infrastructure development provided the country-specific institutional quality is high. On the contrary, countries with low institutional indexes may not have a positive association between FDI inflows and infrastructure development. However, there are exceptions. For example, institutionally strong countries like Ireland and Belgium should invest more funds to boost their financial infrastructure sector. On the other hand, another institutionally strong country like Norway should develop its transport infrastructure. In this study, we are mainly interested in the joint impact of FDI inflows with the institutional variable on infrastructure development that has been largely neglected in the empirical literature. Using two-dimensional panel data for FDI inflows for 39 countries over the period 2000–20, we find that the conditional effects are positive and significant. From the policy point of view, we identify the possible areas of the infrastructure of a country that needs capital to be invested and at the same time identify some of the countries that need to improve their institutional quality that will eventually lead to improvement in the infrastructure development. The results of our study are robust to different institutional measures and infrastructure indices.

This article is an attempt to provide a critical review of the present process of agricultural marketing in India in the wake of the recent discontent amongst the farmers that took place with the passing of the three controversial farm laws in September 2020 and giving respite to the agrarian community of the country by repealing of these new laws in November 2021. The old agricultural system of India needs to be changed. The three farm laws that were passed were of the intention to modernize the Indian agricultural market by encouraging investment and increasing competition. However, there was a country-wide protest from the farmers as they were sceptical that these laws would ultimately withdraw or reduce the security net provided by the states and put them in a vulnerable position. The present review takes a deeper dig into the present agricultural marketing situation of India in the context of the new farm laws and tries to critically evaluate the situation. JEL Classification: Q13 Q15 Q18