Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

In this article, Jayati Ghosh attempts 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, Jayati Ghosh argues that the gendered division of labour in India creates much greater involvement in unpaid labour for women, which in turn has direct and pervasive implications for their involvement in paid employment. Indeed, the interlinkage between the two is so profound that it is impossible to understand trends in one without assessing trends in the other. Click here for full article (This article…

Spare a thought for finance ministers and central bankers in the developing world. They probably heaved sighs of relief when the U.S. Federal Reserve decided against raising interest rates at its latest meeting on July 28. Yet they know that the reprieve is only temporary. Even though the delta variant of the COVID-19 virus could slow down the economic recovery, the relevant question is not if the Fed will tighten U.S. monetary policy, but when. When that happens, it will inevitably add to the current woes of emerging markets, which are already severe and complicated. Over past decades, these countries…

Moderated by Dani Rodrik (Harvard) Panelists: Claudio Ferraz (UBC and PUC-Rio) Jayati Ghosh (UMass Boston) Arjun Jayadev (Azim Premji University and INET) Leonard Wantchekon (Princeton and African School of Economics) This is the first in a series of online conversations. For more details, visit: http://www.iea-world.org/activities/diversifying-economics-globally/discussion-panels/

Chair: Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University) Speakers: Kaushik Basu (Cornell University) Dani Rodrik (Harvard University) Jayati Ghosh (University of Massachusetts) Rohinton Medhora (CIGI)

Chair: Andrew Sheng (University of Hong Kong) Speakers: Danny Quah (National University of Singapore) Jayati Ghosh (University of Massachusetts) Eisuki Sakakibara (President of the Institute for the Indian Economic Studies) Mari Pangestu (World Bank)

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

At long last and more than a year after the need for such a scheme became obvious a parliamentary committee has recommended the institution of an urban employment scheme at the national level. The Standing Committee on Labour stated in its report of 3 August 2021 that “there is an imperative need for putting in place an Employment Guarantee Programme for the urban workforce in line with MGNREGA.” (Incidentally, the Committee also came down on the central government for failing to collect data on the number and conditions of migrant workers, who experienced such suffering during the first lockdown.) The…

Lori Wallach, of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, and Jayati Ghosh, economics professor at UMass Amherst, discuss how first world countries are protecting pharma companies’ exorbitant profits, at the expense of vaccinating people living in the Global South and thereby also endangering everyone in the world. Click here for Transcript (This podcast was originally published in in the Institute for New Economic Thinking on Aug 2, 2021)

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. Click here for full article (This article was originally published in in the Real World Economics Review, Issue No 96)

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. Certainly, conditions for most Indians have improved since that watershed year. Per capita income went up more rapidly than before, life expectancy went up, infant and maternal mortality decreased, income poverty probably went down (though this is hard to tell because of changes in the official estimation of poverty over this period). But this would not have been possible without the foundations…