Despite an abundance of low-skill labour, India has never experienced the kind of takeoff in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing seen in other countries at comparable income levels. This column argues that a key reason for this underperformance is the exit barriers faced by Indian manufacturing firms which entry of new firms, prolong the survival of low-productive and inefficient firms, and lower aggregate output and productivity. Carefully sequenced reforms that lower exit costs could lead to significant gains in terms of aggregate productivity, output, and employment.
India’s structural transformation story is unusual (Rodrik 2016). Despite an abundance of low-skill labour, India has never experienced the kind of takeoff in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing seen in other countries at comparable income levels (Chatterjee and Subramanian 2020). Instead, its manufacturing sector is characterised by a long tail of inefficient firms, limited job creation, and capital-intensive production techniques (Hsieh and Klenow 2009, Padmakumar 2022).
In a recent paper (Chatterjee et al. 2025), we argue that a key reason for this underperformance is the exit barriers faced by Indian manufacturing firms. Exit barriers in India are institutional – they include lengthy bankruptcy processes, burdensome administrative clearances, and strict labour laws that raise the costs of firing what are termed regular workers for firms. These workers perform what are seen as core duties in the firm such as working on the production line.
We show that these exit barriers deter entry of new firms, prolong the survival of low-productive and inefficient firms, and lower aggregate output and productivity. Their impact is especially pronounced in states where institutional frictions make exiting particularly difficult, and in labour-intensive sectors where rigidities in labour adjustment are more consequential and so hinder firm entry, size, and productivity to a greater extent. Our results suggest that carefully sequenced reforms that lower exit costs can lead to significant gains in terms of aggregate productivity, output, and employment.
Why is exiting so hard in India?
India’s manufacturing exit rates are among the lowest in the world, especially in the formal sector. Figure 1 shows that while the US manufacturing sector sees an annual exit rate of around 9%, the corresponding rate in Indian formal manufacturing is just 3.1%. This low level of churn suggests significant frictions in the exit process especially in formal manufacturing, which may be dampening the reallocation of resources to more productive firms.
Figure 1 Firm exit rates
Notes: Left Panel: Exit rates of different countries have been calculated/taken from the following sources: India – calculated from Annual Survey of Industries dataset from survey years 2000-01 and 2015-16; Brazil and Mexico – taken from Bartelsman et al. (2009) averaged from 1990-1999; Chile, Colombia, and Morocco – taken from Roberts and Tybout (1996) for the year 1985; US – taken from figure 1 in ‘Business Exit During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Non-Traditional Measures in Historical Context’ by Crane et al. (2022) for 2006; China – calculated from Annual Surveys of Industrial Production for 2006; Vietnam – calculated from Vietnam enterprise census for 2007. Right panel: Exit rates of service sector firms have been computed from the Prowess database. Other services include accommodation & food services, transport & storage services, and administrative & support services. The annual exit rate of informal manufacturing plants has been computed from NSS data for 1994-95 and 2015-16. For more details on exit calculations, please see Chatterjee et al. (2025).
Institutional and regulatory constraints make it difficult for unproductive or distressed firms to shut down. Even in ideal cases – when firms are fully compliant in terms of the processes to be followed for closure and not involved in litigation – voluntary closure takes an average of 4.3 years (Economic Survey of India 2020-21). Nearly three of those years are spent navigating clearances and refunds from government departments such as the Income Tax office, GST administration, and the Provident Fund authority. When complications arise – such as outstanding debts, worker layoffs, or tax disputes – exit becomes even harder. Moreover, when large numbers of jobs are at stake, political considerations can also come into play. Two main institutional bottlenecks stand out: bankruptcy laws and labour regulations.
First, India lacks a well-defined bankruptcy framework. Until recently, firms facing insolvency had no clear legal route to liquidation. As a result, disputes often ended up in courts and remained unresolved for years due to judicial bottlenecks and inconsistent interpretation of laws. Attempts to improve this – via the SARFAESI Act (2002) and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (2016) – have seen limited success due to enforcement problems and judicial backlogs.
Second, labour laws – particularly the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) – require government approval for firms with over 100 workers to fire even one worker. But it’s not just the law itself; its implementation is highly discretionary. Identical cases can receive different treatments depending on the official or court involved.
Courts in India have often reversed their own precedents, sometimes taking diametrically opposite positions over time. In a recent example, the Supreme Court struck down the buyout of a steel firm – four years after the transaction had been deemed complete. Such reversals illustrate how judicial outcomes can vary widely, with political factors frequently shaping administrative decisions. This legal and regulatory uncertainty significantly increases the costs of exit.
Exit barriers vary across states, so does firm dynamism
Institutional environments differ widely across Indian states, and so do the barriers to firm exit. Some states have relatively business-friendly environments, while others have stricter institutions that make exit difficult. We exploit this variation in our paper to document several facts on how manufacturing firms respond to different institutional settings.
First, entry and exit are positively correlated at the state level (see Figure 2, reproduced from Chatterjee et al. 2025). States with higher entry shares also tend to have higher exit shares, reflecting greater dynamism. In contrast, states with sluggish entry generally also see fewer exits. This pattern suggests that where exit is costly or uncertain, potential entrants may be discouraged by the prospect of being unable to close down if needed. Based on these patterns, we group states into high-performing (HP) and low-performing (LP) categories: HP states (points in red in Figure 2) have high entry and exit shares relative to their size, while LP states (denoted as blue in Figure 2) have low shares of both.
Figure 2 Entry shares versus exit shares of states
Second, misallocation, firm responsiveness to shocks, and the effects of bankruptcy reform vary between HP and LP states. LP states have greater resource misallocation and a long tail of old and less productive firms, suggesting inefficient survival. Firms in LP states are also less responsive to negative shocks, particularly in adjusting their regular workforce. When the SARFAESI Act strengthened creditor rights in 2002, it led to significantly higher exit rates among highly leveraged and distressed firms in LP states. These patterns suggest that exit frictions are more binding in LP states.
Taken together, these facts suggest that in states where institutions make exit harder, misallocation is higher, new firms are discouraged from entering, and inefficient firms continue to operate longer than they should.
Modelling firm behaviour and policy trade-offs
In order to understand the consequences of exit barriers and evaluate potential reforms, we develop a dynamic structural model that incorporates key features of India’s manufacturing sector. Firms in the model are ex-ante identical but become ex-post heterogeneous in productivity, operate under monopolistic competition, and face sunk entry costs.
Exit is costly, due to firing costs – especially for larger firms covered by the Industrial Disputes Act – or due to direct institutional frictions, such as judicial delays and the absence of a bankruptcy procedure. We model these exit barriers flexibly to reflect both the costs embedded in the letter of the law and the uncertainty arising from discretionary implementation. We also capture state-level variation in institutional quality by distinguishing between high-performing (HP) and low-performing (LP) states. Parameter estimates confirm that exit costs and labour firing costs are quantitatively more significant in LP states, consistent with the earlier descriptive evidence. Exit costs in LP states represent 173% of average annual firm sales, compared to 111% in HP states. Firing costs for regular workers in LP states represent 358% of their average annual wage, compared to 256% in HP states.
We use the estimated model to simulate a set of counterfactual reforms that would raise India’s firm exit rate to 50% of the US level. This target can be reached through either labour market reform (reducing firing costs) or lowering direct exit costs (e.g., having a well-laid-out path to bankruptcy).
Our results yield several key insights. First, raising exit rates by reducing firing costs alone raises value-added by 16.4% but lowers employment by 14.6%. This is because large (in terms of employment), unproductive firms that were previously constrained by high firing costs will exit following this reform. While this encourages more firms to enter the market, the entering firms do not fully absorb the workers displaced by large exiting firms. However, raising exit rates by reducing direct exit costs alone facilitates the exit of low-productive firms with smaller employment levels, encourages more firms to enter the market, so that hiring by the new firms more than offsets employment losses from exiting firms. As a result, both value-added and employment increase by 14.3% and 8.1% respectively, making this approach more attractive as well as potentially more politically viable.
Second, making capital supply more elastic (e.g., through encouraging foreign investment) significantly amplifies the gains from either reform. When capital is more elastic in supply, firm entry following either reform is less constrained by the availability of capital, leading to substantially larger increases in the mass of firms operating, value-added, and employment.
Third, there are strong synergies between the two policies. When labour and bankruptcy reforms are implemented together, employment losses from labour reform are reduced or even reversed. This suggests that sequencing matters – tackling direct exit costs (through bankruptcy reform) before reforming labour laws helps preserve jobs while improving efficiency.
We also examine how policymakers should allocate reform budgets between promoting entry and facilitating exit. Governments in developing countries often focus on promoting entry through tax breaks, industrial parks, and startup subsidies. Lowering entry barriers can indeed stimulate productivity and investment (Sampi et al. 2023). Our analysis shows that for a given budget, reducing exit costs generates much larger gains in value-added, especially at higher budget levels. If the objective is to maximise value-added, targeting exit costs is more effective. If the goal is to boost employment, entry subsidies will deliver better results. These findings are timely given the current surge in industrial policies across emerging economies and ongoing debates about policy design choices and which approaches to avoid (Juhasz et al. 2023, Koczan et al. 2024).
Source : VOXeu
