The Effect of Information Technology on Wage Inequality: Evidence from Indian Manufacturing Sector

A persistent widening of skill based wage inequality in the Indian Organised Manufacturing sector has been reported by many researchers. Two main hypotheses had been tested in developed economies to explain such a phenomenon; an inter-sectoral shift in demand structure and an intra-sectoral shift in production technology. A decomposition of the change in wage share of skilled workers showed that sector bias explained very little of the changes in the share of skilled worker wages while more than 85 percent of the changes occurred within industries, giving support to the argument of changing skill mix within industries, rather than between industries. [Working Paper No. 437]