Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

The global devastation caused by Covid-19 is only just beginning, with the severe threat to public health worsened by the evident inability to cope of most health systems across developing and developed countries. Many states across the world appear to have realised the serious potential of this pandemic and have declared lockdowns, closures, partial curfews and curtailment of all but essential activities in efforts to contain the contagion. The economic impacts of such lockdown are also just beginning to be felt, and will escalate in the coming months. The discussion on the economics of this pandemic has tended to focus…

How long the COVID-19 crisis will last, and what its immediate economic costs will be, is anyone's guess. But even if the pandemic's economic impact is contained, it may have already set the stage for a debt meltdown long in the making, starting in many of the Asian emerging and developing economies on the front lines of the outbreak. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on March 16, 2020)

It is now well known that the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2017-18 of the NSSO (the release of which was originally suppressed by the government) revealed a dramatic fall in absolute employment of both men and women, and a further decline in women’s work force participation rates from their already very low levels. There are clearly important questions to ask about a macroeconomic trajectory that can generate such employment outcomes even as GDP appears to have increased reasonably rapidly. But the issue of women’s employment provides a particular conundrum, since it flies in the face of both received wisdom…

Budget 2020, presented by India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Feb. 1, turned out to be worse than a damp squib. It was such a disappointment that its impact on an already weak economy now facing global headwinds, may verge on the disastrous. To paraphrase an expression recently popularised on the streets of many Indian cities: it’s so bad, even the stock markets and industry representatives are protesting! Let’s leave aside the minor irritants, such as the fact that the longest, and possibly most tediously presented, budget speech in Indian history was woefully short on vision, economic strategy and necessary fiscal details. Let’s…

It’s finally time to call the bluff: the Union budget has become a completely meaningless — even misleading —exercise. Those of us who take either the pronouncements or the numbers mentioned on expected revenues and projected spending in the budget documents seriously are being made fools of. So we should stop wasting our time poring over the numbers and pretending that these suggest any direction for the Union government’s fiscal policy, because they don’t. It’s obviously a shame that this should be the case, especially since this year the finance minister subjected the people to the longest-ever budget speech in…

Here’s what we do know: the Indian economy is in a deep funk, in a downward spiral of falling employment, consumption, and investment, and rapidly decelerating GDP growth. The problem, evident for several years now, has been created by a collapse in consumer demand, the bedrock of the country’s economy. This is the dire backdrop against which finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presents her second union budget on Feb. 1. The roots of the crisis were visible as early as the mid-2010s. The unequal pattern of growth left behind daily wage earners and farmers who constitute the bulk of India’s population.…

It’s that time of year again, when people start talking about what the Union Budget may bring in the shape of fiscal policy changes and what it will show about public finances in the previous year. But increasingly, such discussion reflects the triumph of hope over experience, since the Budget of the previous year have shown that we would be foolish to take the numbers seriously. Last year was dramatic because the Finance Minister presented two Budgets that were both divorced from reality: one an “Interim Budget” on 1 February that made extravagantly optimistic guesses about numbers for the last…

Anyone who has been following the upsurge of protests across the country in the wake of the CAA-NRC moves of the government would have been impressed and inspired by the role played by young women. They have been forthright and fearless in articulating their concerns and demands, even in the face of overt repression by the state, and there is no doubt that they provide much hope for the future of the country. These young women have already displayed much courage and resilience—but unfortunately these qualities are likely to become even more necessary, because in addition to Indian politics and…

It is now widely recognised that the Finance Minister misinformed Parliament when presenting the Revised Estimates for central government revenues and expenditures in the Union Budget presented in July 2019. That fact has, however, been largely forgotten, perhaps because to date no Member of Parliament has brought a motion of breach of privilege against her for this act of falsity when presenting the Finance Bill, supposedly the most sacred of bills on which a government can even be defeated. This falsehood was exposed only inadvertently, because the Economic Survey presented by the same Ministry just a day earlier actually contained…

In 2015, United Nations member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include an imperative to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” Yet, in the last four years, matters have deteriorated significantly. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on November 13, 2019)