Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

As India faces the biggest economic crisis since Independence, it is being led by a central government in denial about the severity of the impact on lives and livelihoods, and spreading false hopes about the immediate future. The Monthly Economic Report of the Union Finance Ministry claims that already the economy “is witnessing a sharp V-shaped recovery” suggesting that nothing drastic needs to be done by the government to return to a stable and positive economic growth trajectory. This may just be yet an exercise in perception management that the current government excels in, but it presents a misleading picture…

Now it is official: India has managed to become the global leader in the number of new daily cases of COVID-19 and the worst performing of all major economies during the pandemic so far. How did we manage this double feat? Not through ‘acts of god’, but because of the incompetence and apathy of our current leadership. Data on the decline The estimated 24% GDP contraction in April-June 2020 compared to the previous year is the worst performance among G20 economies, and even compared to other South Asian countries. But these numbers are likely underestimates because they are based on…

It’s truly a delight for me to be able to address the UNCTAD-YSI Summer School. This is not only because these are two groups that I have huge respect for and sympathy with. It’s also because the theme of this Summer School is something very close to my heart, something I and some of my colleagues have been grappling with for decades. It’s really quite energising to realise that there are so many young people willing to engage in this project. So I am going to treat this as an opportunity for me to think through some of the concerns…

Now that India has already overtaken Brazil among countries with the most number of Covid-19 positive cases and is on the verge of even beating the USA, it’s worth trying to understand what has led to this inability to control the pandemic in India. One of the arguments often made is that India, being a developing country with a large poor population engaged in informal work, the standard containment measures are less likely to work. The state also has fewer resources, both financial and real (in terms of health infrastructure and health workers), to combat the disease. All this is…