Green Economy Transition and its Impact on Employment Generation and Economic Sustainability: A Stochastic Multi-Module Simulation of India's Power and Green-Hydrogen Transition to 2050
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63856//ijis/v2i10/07Keywords:
Green economy, Green jobs, Just transition, Inclusive transition, India, Energy transition, Employment factors, Sustainability index, Monte Carlo SimulationAbstract
The prognosis for employment is encouraging in the Green Economy, but only scant and deterministic proof can be found for such large emerging economies like the China Coal Economy. The present study creates GEMSIM-IN, a stochastic model that combines the technology-specific employment factors, coal value chain and macro-accounting, power dispatch, and India 2025 data. Three options – Current Policies (S1), Announced Targets (S2), and an Accelerated Just Green Transition (S3) – are compared for 2050. Entropy-weighted Green Economy Sustainability Index (GESI) and TOPSIS are used to rank scenarios, 10,000 Monte Carlo draws and Sobol indices are used to propagate uncertainty on 21 parameters, and the change in employment is broken down using a logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI). Compared to S1, S3 generates 5.61 million additional energy-sector job-years (Monte Carlo mean 6.47 million, 90% interval −2.40 to 15.96, probability of a positive outcome 0.88), increases GDP by 0.66% in 2040 and avoids 21.6 Gt CO₂. The employment dividend, however, is frontloaded, with maximum net gains still reaching 483 000 jobs in 2032, but losses being recorded after 2045 when construction activity matures, learning reduces its labour intensity, and construction activity displaces labour-intensive coal mining. Rooftop and distributed solar have the highest $JY/USD million of capital expenditure and account for 58% of the variance in output, due to the green multiplier, the informality of coal work and the labor-productivity learning rate. The net losses are now in the states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. S3 ranks first on the GESI (0.750) and TOPSIS (closeness 0.799). Distributed solar energy, in coal regions, just-transition investment and domestic clean energy manufacturing are needed to keep jobs.
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