Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

India is an outlier in terms of low government spending during the pandemic, as we noted last month in an earlier article. Unlike advanced economies and even most developing and emerging market economies, the Indian government did not ramp up public spending to enable its population to cope with the public health disaster and the massive livelihood losses resulting from a mishandled pandemic. Instead, as we showed, central government spending actually declined in the pandemic year 2020-21, according to the government’s own report to the IMF. Now that the Union Budget for 2022-23 is soon to be presented, the concerns…

Through out the continuing pandemic, the Indian government’s fiscal reticence has made it a significant outlier in the world. Advanced economies have gone all out in terms of expanded public spending. Their governments quickly abandoned the (flawed) arguments about the dangers of large fiscal deficits, when large capitalists realised that they would also suffer from the closures and downturns created by the spread of the coronavirus. Even governments in developing countries constrained by external debt overhang and fear of capital flight increased their spending despite declining revenues, both to provide some relief and social protection to their populations, and to…

 In the first lecture of the lecture series on "Gender and Prosperity in Asia" organized by the Institute of Global Prosperity (IGP) at University College London, Jayati Ghosh discusses "How Asia's Growth has Relied on Women's Paid and Unpaid Labor". For More Details Click Here

 In the Democratizing Work plenary keynote session, chaired by Adelle Blackett, Jayati Ghosh discussed The Relevance of Decommodifying Work for People and the Planet. For More Details Click Here

Feminist economists have long argued that the purpose of an economy is to support the survival and flourishing of life, in all its forms. This may seem obvious but it turns on its head the prevailing view, which implicitly assumes the opposite causation: the economy runs according to its own laws, which must be respected by mere human actors. In this market-fundamentalist perspective, it is a potential angry god which can deliver prosperity or devastation and must be placated through all sorts of measures—including sacrifices made in its name. Yet the economy, its markets and its various institutional forms are…

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. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on November 15, 2021)

Jayati Ghosh discusses the access to vaccines and the limiting role of intellectual property rights and pharma monopolies. The lecture is part of the LSE ID Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice series. For More Details Click Here

The Covid-19 pandemic operated to expose various global inequalities in their stark form, but it has also further accentuated them at unprecedented scale and speed. The latest World Economic Outlook from the IMF, released in late October 2021, provides further evidence of how the global divide has increased through the course of the pandemic, most of all the gap between advanced economies and the rest of the world. On the face of it, in terms of GDP changes alone, the divide does not appear to be so stark. Figure 1, which provides IMF estimates of GDP change in the current…

It is by now well known that three decades of financial globalization have led to massive increases in income and asset inequalities in the United States and Europe. But in the developing world, the effects of financial globalization have been even worse: along with new inequality and instability, the creation of “emerging markets” to support investment in poor countries has undermined development projects and created a relationship in which poor countries supply financial resources to rich ones. This is exactly the opposite of what was meant to happen. Yet this growing disparity in per capita incomes across the global North…

In this session moderated by Alexandria Haas, Raul Rigo, Martin Guzman, José Antonio Ocampo, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jayati Ghosh discuss how global tax systems can be reformed and how profits can be reallocated to boost development.