4. The growth of software and human capital formation: public and private investments in training and the rewards to an engineering education
Though India has one of the largest numbers of scientists and engineers it also has some of the lowest rates of literacy in the world with 52% of the total working population that cannot read or write. As Table 3 showed, despite the large total numbers of engineers, the numbers of engineers per million of population was smaller in India compared to several other countries. There is correspondingly an over-reliance on the existing stock of trained but underemployed engineers, for whose services a slowly growing and protected economy could not generate adequate demand.
A very large fraction of the employees of Indian software firms are graduates of engineering college. Most of the Indian software firms
4、软件行业的发展和人力资本的形成:在教育方面的私人和公共投资和工程教育回报
尽管印度拥有世界上最多的科学家和工程师,但是其由于52%的工作人员无法读写,而同时成为世界上识字率最低的国家。正如表3所示,尽管有大量的工程师,但是印度每百万人口里工程师的数量还是低于其他一些国家。由于缓慢增长的干预型经济不能产生对工程师的足够需求,相应的就有对现存但未被雇用的工程师的过度依赖。
大部分的印度软件公司的职员都毕业于工程学院。根据Arora et al. (2000)的报告,大部分被访企业只雇用工程师。60家软件公司的调查数据显示,超过80%的公司雇员有工程师学位,只有13%是在软件发展中被培训起来的非工程师。在采访中,很多公司明确表示他们只雇用工程师。