Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

The world has been preoccupied with the Covid-19 pandemic, and this has also affected policymakers everywhere. There is much more recognition today of the terrible effects of underfunding public health over decades and how this affects the resilience of economies and societies. Yet this official preoccupation with addressing the spread of infectious disease appears to have had an unanticipated negative effect: less policy attention to concerns of food security and hunger.  Poor nutrition is a major underlying factor affecting overall health conditions as well as resistance to disease, yet politicians and global leaders seem to have taken their eyes off…

There is one central message of the Narendra Modi government to the people of India from Budget 2021-22: you will have to be ‘atmanirbhar’ because you’re on your own. The Central government does not have your back. In the midst of the worst health and economic crisis the country has faced since Independence, it will not protect you. It will not spend more to enable food security and employment security, even though its own laws promise that. It will not provide sufficient resources to state governments for them to meet their obligations on health, education and all other essential services…

It is that time of year in India, when all eyes and ears turn to the Finance Minister to learn what she will unveil in the annual Union Budget. But it is a moot point whether, even in a year of the novel coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis that speech will be of much significance. Indeed, it could be argued that there may be little point in listening to or poring over a speech that is likely to conceal more than it reveals. What might be said Going by past experience, we can make some predictions about the Finance Minister’s…