Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

Podcast : Professor Jayati Ghosh talks about the massive unjustness of the so-called pandemic economic rescue packages, which continue to favor the world’s wealthiest while ignoring the dramatic plight of the developing world. (This podcast was originally published in Institute for New Economic Thinking on December 21, 2020.)

Jayati Ghosh discusses how Covid-19 has led to a dramatic decline in economic activity and how the incompetent state responses to the pandemic have intensified the socio-economic and political inequalities that were hidden under the surface until now, in India as well as other developing countries.

Podcast : An increasing number of policymakers, financiers and economists have joined the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in calling for a green recovery from COVID-19. But what does this actually mean? What obstacles will we have to overcome to implement this in practice? And has the global response to COVID-19 so far made our prospects of doing so more or less likely? In Episode 1, we speak to Elliott Harris (Chief Economist of the United Nations), Jayati Ghosh (Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates) and Mercedes Pombo (Youth Leader of the Youth for Climate Movement) to answer these and other key questions as we…

Plummeting GDP, squeeze on jobs - is there a way to rescue the Indian Economy? Will India be able to create a $ 5 trillion economy? Catch BOOM's Govindraj Ethiraj in conversation with Economics Prof. at JNU, Jayati Ghosh & Former Governor of RBI, Raghuram Rajan, via TATA Literature Live

It was a long time coming, but the day of reckoning for the big digital companies may finally have arrived. Despite the growing monopoly power of big tech and their use of anti-competitive practices, earlier attempts to regulate them (such as an attempt by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1998 to rein in Microsoft) had only limited success. The novel coronavirus pandemic further enhanced the monopoly power of the big tech giants. Timeline and actions But now, a rash of lawsuits and regulatory moves in the United States and Europe against the big non-Chinese digital companies (particularly Facebook, Amazon,…

One of the few aspects of the Indian development project that is supposed to have seen some recent success is education. Enrolment has increased significantly in school and higher education, and the gender gap in enrolment has reduced up to secondary education (after which it still remains high). However, the Report of the NSSO’s 75th Round survey of “Household Social Consumption of Education in India” conducted from July 2017 to June 2018 provides some very disturbing results. Essentially, this expansion in education has involved increasingly burdening households for the payment, creating a situation in which education beyond the secondary level…

Note: Opening the Miami Institute’s economics forum, Jayati Ghosh presents severe and persistent forms of discrimination and power imbalances in economic analyses, and underscores older and newer networks of scholars pushing back against these tendencies. Recently, mainstream economics has been forced to acknowledge some of the explicit and implicit forms of discrimination and bias that are rampant in the discipline, thanks in particular to some brave interventions by some women economists. The focus of these interventions has been on still-pervasive patriarchal and racist attitudes that are evident within the discipline in the Global North, particularly in the United States –…

Because a pandemic can be overcome only when it is overcome everywhere, embracing an every-country-for-itself approach would seem irrational. And yet, as the unseemly competition for vaccine doses indicates, that is exactly what many countries have done. The American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech have announced that the COVID-19 vaccine they are jointly developing was more than 90% effective in early clinical trials. The news raised hopes around the world that life may soon return to pre-pandemic normal..... For full article Click Here (This article was originally published in Project Syndicate on November 16, 2020)

The past year has brought into sharp relief the significant differences between China and the rest of the world. The experience of the pandemic is probably the most extreme and definitive expression of that: the ability of China to contain the spread of the virus and prevent a renewed outbreak of any substantive nature is unmatched by almost all other countries, with the exception of a few outliers. The reasons for this certainly deserve separate study, but what is also worth noting is how this has also been associated with a relatively rapid recovery of the Chinese economy from the…

The results of the long-awaited time use survey conducted over January to December 2019 by the NSSO have just been published. This finally allows policy makers and the general public to have some idea of the extent to which unpaid work and other activities determine the lives of people across India. Of course, there are some concerns with the survey methodology, which must be borne in mind while considering the data. To begin with, the survey was based on the recall method, asking respondents about their activities for the previous 24 hours. Where time use is concerned, this is known…