Accelerators of India's Growth-Industry, Trade and Employment

Suresh Chand Aggarwal¿retired as a Professor and Head of the Department of Business Economics, University of Delhi South Campus. He is currently a Senior Fellow, ICSSR affiliated to Department of Business Economics and is associated as a Lead Researcher on labour in an RBI-funded project at the Centre of Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics, on the India KLEMS database. He was earlier associated with the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) as a Senior Consultant. His main research interests are in applied econometrics, labour economics, industrial economics and development economics, areas in which he has published extensively in national and international journals, as well as three books. Deb Kusum Das¿is an Associate Professor in the department of economics at Ramjas College, University of Delhi. His main research fields are productivity and growth in India, jobs and the labour market, and empirical international trade. He received his Ph.D. from the Delhi School of Economics and received the EXIM Bank IEDRA Award 2004 for his doctoral dissertation, "Some Aspects of Productivity and Trade in Indian Industry". He is the co-founder of South Asia Economics Students' Meet - a platform for undergraduate economics students in South Asia. He is also associated with ICRIER (Delhi) as an External Researcher. Rashmi Banga¿is a Senior Economic Affairs Officer & Officer-in-Charge of the unit on Economic Cooperation and Integration among Developing Countries (ECIDC), Division of Globalization and Development Strategies (GDS), UNCTAD, Geneva. She is also a Former Advisor and Head of Trade Competitiveness at the Commonwealth Secretariat, which provides policy support to more than 30 countries. She has worked as a Senior Economist in a DFID-funded UNCTAD project that provided support to the Ministry of Commerce, India, in its trade negotiations. Prior to these engagements, she was an Associate Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India, where she taught for nineteen years. She received her doctorate from Delhi School of Economics, specializing in development economics, international economics and econometrics. She has published extensively in refereed journals on digital issues, international trade and FDI. Her current areas of research include South-South cooperation, digital issues, assessment of free trade agreements, and global and regional value chains. She was honoured with the Export-Import Bank of India's International Economic Development Research Award, and has received two gold medals from the World Bank's Global Development Network for her research on globalization and development.