Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

The disease ripping through the country is only one of the destructive forces affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians. The dramatic increase in hunger is another. Like devastation wrought by the current surge in coronavirus infections, this too is the result of policy failure and official callousness. It is already causing immense suffering among affected people and will have serious repercussions on their future health and physical resilience. Everyone knows that the brutal national lockdown imposed in March 2020 and the subsequent economic collapse led to loss of livelihood among people who had little or no ability…

The Biden administration’s decision to stop opposing a proposed COVID-19 waiver of certain intellectual-property rights under World Trade Organization 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. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on May 7, 2021)

The unfolding pandemic horror in India has many causes. These include the complacency, inaction and irresponsibility of government leaders, even when it was evident for several months that a fresh wave of infections of new mutant variants threatened the population. Continued massive election rallies, many addressed by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, brought large numbers to congested gatherings and lulled many into underplaying the threat of infection. The incomprehensible decision to allow a major Hindu religious festival the Mahakumbh Mela, held every 12 years—to be brought forward by a full year, on the advice of some astrologers, brought millions from across India…

The By-invitation section publishes commentaries from a range of perspectives. For a view in favour of maintaining intellectual property rights related to covid and health, read a commentary by Michelle McMurry-Heath. The Rapid creation of covid-19 vaccines is an amazing technological feat. It shows how much can be accomplished when human inventiveness and private-sector involvement are given extensive public support, from basic research to massive subsidies. However, the innovation is futile unless the vaccines are distributed equitably. The public-health benefits are undermined by a deepening chasm in availability. With most inoculations occurring in just a few rich countries and the vast majority of…

In an important new paper (“External balance sheets of emerging economies: low-yielding assets, high-yielding liabilities”, Review of Keynesian Economics, Vol. 9 No. 2, Summer 2021, pp. 232–252) the Turkish economist Yilmaz Akyuz has identified new channels of transmission of global financial shocks resulting from open capital accounts in emerging markets, which have led to “sizeable wealth transfers between emerging and advanced economies. They have also resulted in significant income transfers in view of negative yield differentials between their gross external assets and liabilities.” In India’s case, Akyuz estimates that between 2000 and 2016, gross foreign assets (claims that Indian residents…

While the United States and other advanced economies rush to vaccinate their populations and gear up for post-pandemic booms, developing countries and emerging economies continue to struggle. Fortunately, rich countries could help everyone else – and themselves – at little to no cost. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on March 24, 2021)

To listen to podcast click here Max and Nabil interview the world-leading, award-winning, rebel Indian economist Jayati Ghosh. In this fast-paced and inspiring interview Jayati makes the radical case for care – and tells us what she really thinks about all those politicians around the world talking a good talk about gender equality. Around the world women and girls put in billions of hours of unpaid care work each day – that’s the cooking, the cleaning, the caring for children, sick and the elderly. We ask Jayati: how is this at the heart of the global inequality crisis? Why’s it…

The Covid-19 pandemic has been unusual in several ways: the disproportionate extent to which people in rich countries (particularly in Europe and North America) have been affected; the sheer scale of the policy response for containment; and the speed and urgency of the global response. The active interest in controlling the pandemic in rich countries shaped individual national responses as well as global policy. There was a massive push for vaccine development, through large subsidies for research and development to drug companies, pre-orders of vaccines, and other support by the US, Russia, China, and European countries. This led to the…

In their saner moments, most progressives in the European Union might concede that the bloc has not acquitted itself very well as a global player during the pandemic. To be sure, it has finally displayed some good sense in looking after its own, as the delayed but reasonably large EU-wide fiscal stimulus and future-oriented spending package suggests. And it has broken out of the counterproductive mindset which forbade the European Central Bank from buying the bonds of individual member governments and has even laid the groundwork for the kind of fiscal co-operation that behoves a monetary union. So citizens of…