Today I Learnt 14

The State of Indian Economy

The recent surge in COVID-19 cases has also manged to crush the economic recovery hopes.
Although there hasn’t been a three-month national lockdown, there are local lockdowns almost everywhere in the country.

Google LLC “Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports”. https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/ Accessed: May 17, 2021.

The workplace mobility has fallen sharply (by about 54%) since its peak in March 2021.¹
Retail and recreation related mobility is down by a whopping 63%. This is really important because the informal economy is the primary source of income for a large portion if the population in India.

According to data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), data the unemployment rate (calculated as a 30-day moving average) stands at 8.9%.
The labour participation rate (LPR)² has been dropping sharply since March. It fell to 39.98%. This is the lowest LPR since May 2020 during the national lockdown.
The employment rate fell from 37.6 per cent in March to 36.8 per cent in April. (Link)
Even with a decline in the labor force (of about 11 lakhs) looking for employment in April, they are still failing to find employment, resulting in the high unemployment rate.
Salaried employee job losses
- saw a loss of 3.4 million jobs in April.
- The cumulative loss stands at staggering 12.6 million.

TODO : Create an interactive way to present the publicly available data on electoral bonds.

The baseline is the median value, for the corresponding day of the week, during the five week period 3 Jan – 6 Feb 2020. I personlly think that this a very good indicator given the lack of privacy awareness and profusion of android phones in India. ↩︎
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/participationrate.asp LPR is a measure of an economy’s active workforce. $$ \text{LPR} = \dfrac{\text{workers employed}+\text{people actively seeking employment}}{total noninsitutionalized working-age population}. $$ ↩︎