Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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.

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. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on October 12, 2021)

Jayati Ghosh delivered the keynote address at the Group of 78 conference and discussed reforms to the global economic architecture, that are urgently needed to mobilize the necessary resources for adaptation in the developing world.

The trade-and-technology war between the US and China effectively began in 2018. On  July 6, 2018, US President Donald Trump unilaterally imposed a 25 per cent tariff on Chinese imports of around $34 billion, and further tariffs in 2018 and 2019—claiming that trade between US and China had been unfairly skewed in China’s favour and needed to be rebalanced. The ostensible reason put forward was the persistence of what were called “unfair trade practices” and “technology theft” by China. Thereafter, the trade war has continued into the administration of President Biden, and morphed into a technology war, which is probably…

Climate change is posing immediate threats to humanity, and indeed to all living organisms on the planet, in extreme weather events across the globe. Other environmental stresses include rising water levels or falling water tables, desertification and salination. Agriculture—especially industrial agriculture requiring chemical inputs—is cause and victim of these changes. Cultivation patterns such as mono-cropping, with heavy reliance on groundwater and chemical inputs, have reduced the food sovereignty of poor countries and generated growing environmental problems. These, along with the impact of climate change, have affected food security and caused more severe and widespread hunger, so that the number of…

Capitalism is supposed to be all about economic growth, through the dynamism that is created by competition. This growth is meant to be driven by investment (or accumulation) which in turn is used to justify the shares of national income that are delivered to private profits, to the owners of capital. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets” famously said a certain Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital more than 150 years ago. It is undeniable that investment is the fundamental driving force of capitalism. Of course, there have been and continue to be many naysayers, who…