MRIDUL EAPEN Trends in Public Sector Employment and Earnings PART Two AN ttempt is made in this part to study the changes in per capita real earnings in the public sector as a whole and also their movement for i) different constituents of it and ii) different categories of government employees. DATA BASE Data on earnings are difficult to obtain. It has been pointed out by P Venkataramaiah1 that in looking at changes in real earnings of employees what one ideally needs is time series data on wages of each type of worker having the same type of skill. This information should be available for the different sectors, public and private, and within each sector for the different industrial groups. Such data are however not available.2 Time series on monthly per capita real earnings of factory workers have been constructed by the Labour Bureau3 for those earning i) below Rs 200 per month from 1939 to 1951 and then again from 1951 to 1964 and ii) more than Rs 200 but less than Rs 400 per month from 1961 onwards, the assumption being that all those in a particular pay range have similar skills.4 These data are based on the Annual Returns of the Payment of Wages (POW) Act 1936.6 Statistics of per capita daily earnings of employees in all