While the neoliberal focus has been on attempts to “shrink the state” on the grounds of corruption and inefficiency, sensible people have long recognised that high levels of public employment tend to be associated with better quality of life for people in a society. After all, the essential public services, from infrastructure to amenities, to security to social services, mostly have to be delivered by governments. This is because private markets simply do not provide them or underprovide them, and also because private provision, based on profitability, delivers much more unequal results. And delivering all this necessarily requires employing people.
Because of this, it is possible to argue that the extent of public employment can be a useful indicator of the coverage and quality of public services in a country. By this marker, unsurprisingly, Scandinavian countries (known also to be among the most equal societies in the world) have the largest extent of public employment. But what is also remarkable is just how low India’s public employment is by international standards. Figure 1 shows that, relative to population, public employment in India is only one-tenth of that in Norway, only 15 per cent of that in Brazil and much less than a third of that in China. Clearly, India is hugely underproviding public services, and it is therefore no surprise that so many people remain excluded from the essential public services that ensure quality of life, or receive such services only very partially and inadequately.
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