Jayati Ghosh

Jawaharlal Nehru University | JNU · Centre for Economic Studies and Planning

From his days as a doctoral student, Prabhat Patnaik was convinced that given the structure and spontaneous logic of capitalism, its expansion and relative ‘stability’ could not be understood without incorporating the role of primitive accumulation and imperialism in its development. That quest made clear that without transcending capitalism and th...

Over the last three years the Indian rupee has experienced continuous decline, with bouts of sharp depreciation influenced by multiple factors but led principally by capital outflows.

The FAO's recent wheat production and utilization forecasts indicate that the focus on the war in Ukraine as the sole driver of explosive global price trends is misplaced and ill-advised.

The government's celebration of record levels of FDI inflows in 2021-22 as indication of the strength of the Indian economy misreads the numbers that point to several underlying weaknesses in India's external account.

There is no doubt that creative industries, along with care activities, are going to emerge as some of the most significant economic sectors of the future. Broadly speaking, the creative industries consist of advertising, architecture, arts and crafts, design, fashion, film, video, photography, music, performing arts, publishing, research & develop...

The concentration of technology and tacit knowledge related to renewable energy can emerge as an additional constraint to its wider adoption in many low and middle income countries.

More frequent and intense heat waves are poised to become bigger killers in the Indian subcontinent than the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But the government is essentially leaving people to fend for themselves in a foreseeable tragedy, and envisages continued investment in fossil fuels for decades to come. Click here for full article. * This articl...

Having embraced neoliberal reform in the late 1970s, Sri Lanka had privileged access to large borrowing from the IMF and private financial markets. Exploiting that privilege has proved to be a poison pill.

Governments of rich countries are the ones showing the greatest panic in responding to rising global oil prices, but the relative price of petrol is already much higher is low and middle income countries with bigger poor populations.

The complacency generated by India's low external debt exposure and large foreign reserves ignores the composition and character of that exposure.

The inflation rates according to the Wholesale Price Index and the Consumer Price Index have diverged substantially in the recent past. In addition to weighting differences, this could reflect underlying macroeconomic changes in the Indian economy.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has roiled energy markets. All sides lose. The US and its allies because of energy shortages and inflation; Russia because oil is crucial to its economic performance.

Claims of a robust recovery are undermined by the quarterly national accounts data, which show weak recovery in major sectors and levels of consumption and investment still below pre-pandemic levels.

In her budget speech 2022, the finance minister claimed to have launched a targeted capital expenditure drive over the current financial year (2021-22) and the next. A closer look at allocations reveals more.

The Indian economy is still facing major demand deficiency and the government needs to step in to shore up mass consumption demand. But current public spending trends are not a good sign.

Despite the collection of substantial information on household asset holdings through the official Debt and Investment Surveys, India still lacks an official source of data that allows for reliable and meaningful assessments of trends in the levels and distribution of household wealth.

The unjustifiable conservatism that characterised the central government's fiscal stance in the first pandemic year has persisted, worsening the impact of the health emergency and imposing long-term costs on the Indian people.

Subject to a fiscal squeeze even before the economic contraction that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic, state governments are now facing a fiscal crisis that is bound to drag down the economy.

Current measures of climate responsibility understate the emissions created by final demand, especially in the advanced countries, because they ignore how countries can "export carbon emissions" through imports. But measures to address this through trade protectionism will be counterproductive.

Global leaders, especially in the developed world, still fail to grasp the gravity of the climate challenge. Although they acknowledge its severity in their speeches, they mostly pursue short-term national interests, without clear and immediate commitments to act.

Global commodity prices are rising, driven by the revival in economic activity as the pandemic wanes, supply constraints and new demand stemming from sources such as the energy transition. The question is whether the surge will be transitory or persist for a long time.

Inter-country economic inequalities have been greatly accentuated by the pandemic, to a level that is likely to become unsustainable and generate significant geopolitical tensions.

UN Women has produced a clear and pervasive blueprint on the Feminist Plan for Sustainability and Social Justice, which puts much-needed flesh on the bare bones of a feminist approach to the economy, relevant to the contemporary world. Now the task is to do it.

While the world grapples with inflation, September 2021 figures from India seem to suggest that consumer prices are in deceleration mode. But this may just be a lull before an impending storm.

Three decades of financial globalization have led to massive income and asset inequalities in the US and Europe, and have had worse impacts in the developing world. This inequality is not a bug in the system, but a result of how global financial markets have been allowed to function.

The Doing Business controversy has shaken the confidence in the Bretton Wood institutions, but it must not obscure the real problems with their functioning - the disproportionate power of the US; the IMF's deeply procyclical approach to countries that seek its support, and the G7 advanced economies' unwillingness to address global problems.

The US-China trade war has not affected the continued increase in the US trade deficit. But the real purpose is control of frontier technologies.

Climate change poses immediate threat to humanity. Unsustainable cultivation patterns along with climate change have affected food security and caused widespread hunger. These issues are too urgent to be allowed to go unresolved.

Despite its many shortcomings, the minimum support price-based procurement regime is gaining in terms of farmer, crop and geographical coverage. The benefits from the regime that underlie this tendency explain why fear that it may be dismantled triggers protest.

Capitalism is conventionally portrayed as a dynamic system driven by private investment sustained by forces of competition. However, evidence from the globalisation years suggests that neither growth nor the levels and pattern of investment support that view.

In this article, I attempt to extend Krishna Bharadwaj’s insight on interlinked rural markets to the analysis of the interlinkages between paid and unpaid economic activities; in other words, between work and employment. Specifically, I argue that the gendered division of labour in India creates much greater involvement in unpaid labour for women,...

With Vodafone-Idea threatening to throw in the towel, India's telecom business is headed for a private sector duopoly that shares the market with an emaciated public sector. But matters may not stop there.

The perfect storm of Covid-19 and climate change delivers the glaring message that the apocalypse is now. The novel coronavirus mutates into more transmissible, drug-resistant variants, while climate catastrophe plays out in real time.

Millions of urban Indian residents are struggling without livelihood opportunities, especially younger workers. A national urban employment scheme needs to be put in place immediately.

One thing most economists agree on regardless of their ideological persuasion, is the importance of productivity increases. Yet, of all economic concepts widely in use, that of aggregate productivity may be the most problematic and full of conceptual and measurement holes.

A spike in India's foreign exchange reserves is a surprising feature of the period since March 2020 when the economy has been reeling under the damaging effects of the pandemic. But that trend is no cause for celebration.

There is a common trope, fed especially to generations born after 1991, that economic progress and modernization in India really occurred only after 'liberalizing' economic reforms were introduced three decades ago. This is a travesty of the truth; progress in India has been minimal or even non-existent.

Europe should realize that their own governments are operating against their own interests to suit Big Pharma. The pandemic will not be over until global mass vaccination is completed. So even without an international solidarity, it is in the self-interest of Europeans to demand that their governments put people above profits.

Financial liberalisation that was meant to mobilise more resources for domestic investment in emerging markets in the 'dynamic' East Asian region has led to exactly the opposite.

The tax proposal decided at the G7 meeting has been hailed as ‘historic’ and 'transformative', but unfortunately its neither. Changes need to be made by the G20, if there is to be any serious global tax reform.

The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code has been officially hailed as a powerful instrument to resolve defaulted corporate debt quickly and efficiently. But five years after the code was enacted, the evidence establishes that claim to be just a myth.

The impending debt crisis in several developing countries is spread across low- and middle-income countries, and complicated by the growing role of private players. Yet global leaders show few signs of urgency or adequate action to deal with it.

The major plank of the Centre's safety net during periods of lockdown necessitated by the Covid pandemic has been the provision of free foodgrain to targeted beneficiaries. But both in terms of need and state capacity, that effort has been limited.

A survey conducted in October 2020 shows widespread hunger across 11 states. Immediate relief measures are urgently required, since matters would have got much worse since then.

The Biden administration's decision to stop opposing a proposed COVID-19 waiver of certain intellectual-property rights under WTO rules is a welcome move. But ending the pandemic also requires scaling up knowledge and technology transfer, as well as public production of vaccine supplies.

Though displaying trends similar to other Asian emerging markets, foreign portfolio capital inflows and market performance in India have distinctive features that give cause for concern.

The unfolding pandemic horror in India has many causes, including the complacency, inaction and irresponsibility of government leaders and the continued election rallies, when the threat of new mutant variants was evident.

India's increasingly open capital account is facilitating large gross and net inflows of foreign capital into the country. But while this does not translate into increased real investment, it imposes a large foreign exchange cost on the economy.

China's transformation, from being the manufacturing hub of the world to being a global hub for R&D and innovation, poses a challenge that attracts adverse attention from the rest of the world.

Supply side disruptions combine with stockpiling and speculation to drive up global food prices. With low income earners still to recover from the Covid-induced crisis, the trend is a cause for concern.

Blatant vaccine grab by rich countries; protection of patent rights by governments in advanced countries and the use of vaccine distribution to promote 'soft power' have exposed and intensified global inequalities; but a pandemic can be overcome only when it is overcome everywhere.

The large European Union-wide fiscal stimulus suggests that the bloc has displayed some good sense finally in looking after its own, but vis-à-vis the developing world, the EU's behaviour has ranged from dismaying to reprehensible to downright appalling.

Even before Covid-19, global hunger was increasing and the world was no longer on track to meet the SDG of eliminating hunger by 2030. Matters have got much worse since then.

Defying all logic, India's equity market has been experiencing a heady and prolonged boom in a year when the real economy contracted. A correction is inevitable.

In the midst of the worst health and economic crisis the country has faced since Independence, the government will not spend more on anything that affects the lives of the people. The Budget documents constitute an extended piece of fiction and the numbers in the Budget bear little relation to the reality.

How much the government claimed to have spent in 2020-21, and how much it intends to spend in 2021-22, are the two main numbers to look out for in the upcoming budget as these will determine whether there is any real hope of sustained macroeconomic recovery in the near future.

The budget speech is most likely to be a self-congratulatory declaration of how the government's finances have withstood the pandemic and how the economy is reviving, but it will only be worth listening to if the Finance Minister moves to a more expansionary fiscal stance that prioritises employment generation and public service provision.

The central government's cynical and expropriative attitude to the states has meant the wrecking of fiscal federalism, with worrying consequences for India's future.

The influential economist behind Europe’s research-funding plan lays out her reasoning. The influential economist behind Europe’s research-funding plan lays out her reasoning.

The US is nowhere near as economically dominant as it was even a decade ago. Yet President-elect Joe Biden can take several relatively simple steps that would have far-reaching benefits for the US economy, the American people, and the rest of the world. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/biden-four-steps-to-boost-global-economy-by-jayati...

The differential ability, resulting from preexisting global inequality, to address the Covid crisis with increased government spending is likely to substantially worsen those inequalities.

Weakness in India’s external sector cannot be used as an excuse for the lack of increased fiscal spending by the Indian government.

The novel coronavirus pandemic further enhanced the monopoly power of the big tech giants, but the lawsuits and regulatory moves in the West suggest that their easy, unchecked expansion may be coming to an end.

China's use of yuan-denominated central bank swaps, while enhancing its influence, is a source of support for developing countries in an unequal international order.

An official survey reveals how education spending has gone up sharply in India, forming a huge financial burden on households and excluding the majority of the population from higher education.

Jayati Ghosh discusses the forms of discrimination and bias that are rampant in economics and enlists some networks that are challenging the rigidities and power structures within the mainstream discipline.

Dependence on remittances is proving to be an additional source of vulnerability among low and middle income countries in Covid times. But not all are affected to the same degree: and those more dependent and facing larger losses are badly hurt.

Because a pandemic can be overcome only when it is overcome everywhere, embracing an every-country-for-itself approach would seem irrational. And yet, as the unseemly competition for vaccine doses indicates, that is exactly what many countries have done.

Growing divergence in economic performance between China and the rest of Asia indicates both reduced regional integration and setbacks in some of China’s Asian neighbours.

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis government debt has been on the rise in countries across the world. When the crisis recedes, recovery would depend on the extent to which governments choose to finance repayment with new taxation of the rich.

The results of the time use survey of the NSSO reveal expected but nonetheless striking results about how men and women in India spend their time very differently, with women hugely burdened by unpaid work.

The emergence of a trade surplus in India's balance of payments over the first five months of 2020-21 does not signal what it would in normal times. A closer analysis of the trade data traces the surplus to the behaviour of an economy in recession.

Piketty´s best-seller book has brought distributional issues to the fore of economic debate. This is perhaps its main contribution. Piketty centers his analysis on inequality, which, under capitalism, goes hand in hand with economic growth, according to his analysis. In my critical review of the book (Beker, 2014) I asked whether reduction of inequ...

Fiscal policy in India has been very timid during the period of the most brutal and inefficient (in terms of public health outcomes) lockdowns in the world. Unless this is changed, the economy may plummet further.

India has become the global leader in the number of Covid-19 cases and has recorded the worst economic performance in South Asia or even amongst the G20 countries. Wealth tax and taxes on the multinational corporations need to be imposed and urgent action needs to be taken to tackle the situation.

To treat the divergence in the performance of stock markets and the real economy as purely externally driven and only capable of self-correction is to avoid taking much-needed action.

A comparison with India's South Asian neighbors points to significant shortfalls in the management of the COVID pandemic in India. This is also the result of the relatively long term neglect of health provision in India.

India has been a world leader in economic disparities and social discrimination for a while and the pandemic policy response proves that some lives are much cheaper than others.

The most destructive effects of Covid-19 in India have not been the result of the disease, but the nature of the government response. The most stringent lockdown in the world destroyed the economy and forced millions into poverty and hunger, but did not control virus transmission. The resurgence of disease as restrictions were lifted and the contin...

Three years after introduction of the GST, there are no clear signs that this is a regime that can deliver revenue growth of a kind that can justify persisting with it.

The Modi government is pushing the Indian economy into further contraction through its completely inappropriate conservative fiscal stance.

Developing Asia's external debt can emerge as a major vulnerability not so much because of the volume of debt, but because of its composition, especially the greater reliance on short term debt and foreign holders of debt securities.

Prof. Jayati Ghosh talks with Number13 about India’s response to the pandemic and its myriad impacts on society. It is not Covid-19 itself, but the highly classist government responses which have destroyed the economy, employment and livelihood of the country.

In April 2020, while 'emerging market economies' remained steeped in the Covid-induced crisis, in a paradoxical turn, equity markets in some of these countries experienced a recovery. That may not be a good sign.

As the world grapples with the fall-out of the Covid-crisis, the Trump administration is ramping up its protectionist rhetoric vis-à-vis China. If this leads to new sanctions it would not help the US but worsen the Covid-induced trade crisis.

The sharp and rapid increase of inequality due to the Covid-19 pandemic is driving home the urgency of internationalism. Jayati Ghosh explains how we can change the global economic architecture to enable a Global Green New Deal.

The plan of some state governments to dilute labour laws in order to attract investment is not just ethically vile but economically stupid.

Early evidence shows that official response to the Covid-induced crisis in the US and Europe may lengthen recession. If the needed fiscal effort is not put in place even a delayed recovery may prove elusive.

Food and livelihood support must be provided to those who have been forced to bear the burden of the Covid-19 lockdown - and the Centre can easily afford it. Excuses based on public finances will not wash.

There are still many uncertainties about the COVID-19 pandemic: about the extent of its spread, its severity in different countries, the length of the outbreak, and whether an initial decline could be followed by a recurrence.

India has betrayed the developing world by blocking a proposal for the IMF to issue new SDRs, which would have provided much-needed liquidity at a time of crisis.

The global economy is in the grip of an unprecedented crisis, once never experienced before in its history. The virus pandemic has yet to run its course in most countries, but meanwhile, the containment measures – which have involved major restrictions on mobility, gatherings and economic activity – have already imposed a massive economic cost.

The flight of footloose portfolio capital from India has attracted attention because of its impact on stock indices and the value of the rupee. But the bigger danger is of a debt shock that can be more damaging for the corporate sector.

As the pandemic unfolds, the Indian economy is falling off a cliff. There is an immediate need for massive public spending beyond conventional fiscal standards. There is also a need for a global plan for significant debt reduction, massive increase in global liquidity, more aid and moratoriums to survive this crisis.