This chapter offers an introduction to Making India Work. It presents a snapshot of India’s welfare regime today and outlines its distinctive features in comparative perspective. The chapter establishes that the development of social policies has been a significant component of the building of India’s national economy and polity. Historical decisions have had longer-term implications for the shape and size of the country’s social provision, yet social policy has been curiously marginalised within classic scholarship on India’s political economy. The introductory chapter defines the term ‘welfare regime’ as distinct from a ‘welfare state’ and introduces the analytical tools necessary to identify the components of a welfare regime in a context of high economic informality. It provides an overview of methods and historical sources and summarises the book’s main arguments before providing an outline of the book structure.

While national rules regarding the scope, availability and issuance of utility models vary from country to country, most utility model regimes offer protection for tangible products, with many, but not all, jurisdictions excluding processes, biological materials and computer software from the scope of protection. The duration of utility model protection ranges from five to fifteen years, with most countries offering ten years of protection. In most countries, utility model applications are not formally examined and must simply disclose the product in question. Given the lack of examination, obtaining utility models is generally viewed as faster and cheaper than obtaining patents. This combination of speed and cost, in theory, makes utility models potentially attractive to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that cannot afford to obtain full patent protection. Similar considerations have also been raised as advantageous to innovators in low-income countries.

This chapter provides an overview of the origins, expansion and reform of India’s welfare regime since the early twentieth century. It outlines the contributions of the book to wider literatures on the histories and politics of social policy in developing countries. The chapter demonstrates interventions in three bodies of literature: firstly, to histories of labour and of the mid twentieth-century democratic and developmental Indian state at the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial eras; secondly, to the literature on the political economy of democracy and development in postcolonial India; thirdly, to the comparative politics literature on welfare regimes beyond Europe and North America. The chapter highlights three factors for their role in shaping the nature of India’s welfare regime over the past century: firstly, the changing shape of India’s model of capitalism; secondly, the gradual deepening of democratic participation; and thirdly, the multi-level territorial articulation of both capitalism and electoral politics.

The global landscape for existing utility model rights is a helpful starting point to the discussion on utility model innovation policy at the country-level as well as firm strategy. WIPO data indicates that approximately 3.0 million utility model applications were filed globally in 2022, a growth rate of 2.9% from the previous year and close to the global total of 3.5 million applications for standard patents. Only about one-half of the world’s countries provide for utility model systems, yet companies from around the world acquire these rights. Utility models are important players in the IP environment, and the unique qualities of the system and differential representation require specific analysis. In this chapter, we review existing empirical data and present additional data regarding UM filings and litigation worldwide. Our purpose is to provide background and context for the more detailed discussion in the remaining chapters in this book.

The UN General Assembly, a body including representatives of all UN member governments, serves as the primary forum for defining a better world order through peaceful change. It has endorsed programs of peaceful change at all levels of ambition at different times and on different issues. Much of its activity has focused on the minimalist goal of averting or ending particular wars. On other issues, most notably decolonization, national economic development, and adding environmental concerns to the intergovernmental agenda, it has contributed to incremental change in the states system. Yet the limits on what governments would endorse became clear on issues such as human rights where changes would affect domestic political orders. The end of the Cold War and related domestic-level political changes provided the context for higher ambition, which peaked in 2005 when the General Assembly endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs offered a vision of deep peace in which universal respect for human rights, human development, and human security prevail within ecologically sustainable societies. Yet the subsequent spread of authoritarian rule within states and increased geopolitical tensions between major states have reinforced governments’ traditional approaches to states system, reducing the ambition of programs for peaceful change.

This chapter shows that child labor is common in most countries with sweatshops but that most children don’t work in manufacturing – most work in agriculture or the service sector. Thus, calls to ban imported sweatshop goods made using child labor ends up shifting even more children into agriculture and services where pay is often lower and work less safe. The chapter argues that the process of economic development that raises average incomes has been the main cure for child labor. Anti–child labor laws typically codify improvements that market competition already achieved.

This chapter explains how the market process creates the right capital and technology to promote the process of development. It explains how an institutional environment of economic freedom best promotes the process of development and provides empirical evidence to support this view. It then reviews how economic freedom has evolved in countries that had sweatshops identified in the first edition of this book.

Wraps up the main message of the book.

The main purpose of this chapter is to study gender inequality within the inventive activities in three emerging countries – Brazil, India, and Mexico – using the framework of knowledge economics. It aims to determine which factors that influence a growing propensity of women to be inventors help reduce gender inequality in knowledge economies. In addition, the chapter contributes policy proposals that aim at increasing female participation in inventive activities. The key questions for this research are as follows: What are the characteristics and dynamics of female inventive activities in emerging countries with different economic development paths? What factors influence women’s propensity to invent? Based on the results of the econometric model proposed in this chapter, the inventive variables, such as the stock of prior knowledge, the size of inventor teams, the type of patent holder, technological field, and the presence of foreign researchers – positively influence women’s propensity to become inventors in a differentiated manner in each country. These findings validate how some variables could influence the inclusion of a greater number of women in research teams and the deployment of their potential inventive activities. The chapter proposes policies aimed at reducing gender inequality in the knowledge economy.

Chinese nationals working, studying, and living overseas have always been an important issue for Chinese policy-makers, who have adopted a variety of policies to protect, support, attract back, and monitor them. This first section of this chapter provides an overview of the presence of Chinese nationals overseas, where they are mostly located, and the factors that shape their presence. It then analyzes the main regulatory and diplomatic efforts made by the Chinese state to protect them. The policies adopted by the Chinese government to support and manage the Chinese diaspora, as well as lure back those highly educated nationals who are seen as an important source of innovation for the Chinese economy are discussed in the second half of the chapter. This discussion is followed by an analysis of the evolution of China’s military activities aimed at protecting Chinese citizens overseas. Overall, it emerges that the Chinese state has invested significant bureaucratic and diplomatic resources in these activities, preferring to keep a low profile in military terms.

The chapter examines how the size and diversity of the migrant population shaped economic outcomes in western Poland using statistical analysis. It shows that when state institutions were extractive, the composition of the migrant population played no role in shaping economic performance. Once institutions became more inclusive, however, municipalities settled by more regionally diverse populations registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates. The chapter then rules out a series of alternative explanations for these findings.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

This chapter addresses the myth that rural regions are unsustainable due to challenges with economies of scale and the perception that rural life must be “subsidized.” While urban life is commonly viewed as dynamic and efficient, rural life is often considered a waste of resources. These views cause skepticism about investing in, and supporting, rural life more robustly. There are several problems with the myth of rural unsustainability. First, it neglects urban–rural interdependence and the fact that cities are subsidized by rural provision of food, energy, fibers, and other natural and processed resources. Second, the myth discounts the decades-long tradition of utilities and common carrier regulation in the United States. Economic regulation, which was more substantial prior to the deregulatory era since the 1980s, was designed to help facilitate geographic convergence, guard against concentration of resources in mega-cities, create a cohesive national economy, and make the distribution of resources and opportunities across landscapes more equitable. The chapter interrogates the concept of economies of scale, explores overlooked urban dependency, and reviews legal history and legislative debates surrounding transportation and telecommunications regulation, such as through the Interstate Commerce Commission, to make the case that rural communities should and can be sustained, and are thus “sustainable.”

As English state capacity grew and the crown faced growing financial constraints at home, colonies became tempting targets. This chapter explores the crown’s attempts to unwind the institutions of contractual imperialism and assert unilateral, direct control over colonies. However, when the crown made these attempts, colonial institutions had taken deep root over decades. The chapter explains why the crown was unable to force its vision of government on the colonies autocratically, and instead pivoted to a negotiated model of governance: Regulatory imperialism.