Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

There are really only two numbers to look out for in the forthcoming budget: how much did the government claim to have spent in 2020-21, and how much does it intend to spend in 2021-22. These two numbers will determine whether there is any real hope of sustained macroeconomic recovery in the near future, notwithstanding any claims of green shoots or revival that the finance minister may point to. As it is, the Indian government’s response to COVID-19 has been, in purely economic terms, one of the worst in the world.  Not only did it impose a national lockdown without notice…

India’s Constitution puts the bulk of responsibility for the basic goods and services to be provided to citizens on to state governments. That is also why it mandated that independent Finance Commissions be appointed every five years to determine the distribution of tax revenues between Centre and the various states. Successive Finance Commissions (FCs) have also recognised that state governments necessarily require more resources to fulfil their obligations, which is why the share of tax revenues to be devolved to states has been steadily increasing across such Commissions, from 29.5 per cent in the 11th FC to as much as…