Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

When the third estimate of US growth in the last quarter of 2018 was released the euphoria exuded by forecasters of global growth even a few months earlier waned. The annualised quarter on quarter growth rate that had risen to a more than comfortable 4.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2018, had fallen to 3.4 and 2.2 per cent in the subsequent two quarters (Chart 1). The quarterly rates measuring growth relative to the corresponding quarter in the previous year after having risen consistently have stagnated (Chart 2). Once again it appears that growth in the US is…

The SDGs were obviously incredibly ambitious – far more so than the Millennium Development Goals that they succeeded – and so it was indeed a remarkable achievement that governments of almost all countries signed up to them. There were no less than 17 very significant and substantive goals, each containing multiple targets, and each target relying often on more than one indicator. And these goals and targets are not simply extrapolations of past trends (as several of the MDGs were). Rather, some of them present formidable challenges, since they require a reversal of the prior trends, such as reducing inequalities,…

The Congress Party’s recent declaration that if voted to power, it will seek to ensure a minimum income to 20 per cent of the poorest households in the country is laudable in intent. It also brings back policy attention to the penury and insecurity that continue to plague much of India’s population, and particularly the most destitute. But as presented, it is completely unworkable – and if the Congress Party is really serious about this goal of eliminating poverty, it will have to think of a different way of reaching it. Consider the broad outlines of the scheme that was…

Capitalism has always been a global system, but not in fixed ways. Different national powers have emerged and become dominant over the centuries, but the fundamental processes underlying the uneven development of global capitalism have not altered; they continue to be driven by imperialism the struggle of large capital over economic territory of various kinds. Since the late 1960s, only the East Asian region has shown notable increases in its share of global GDP, and for the last two decades this has been dominated by the rise of China. This is directly related to the ability of the Chinese state…

The gender distribution of migrant workers has a macroeconomic impact – it affects both the level and the volatility of remittance inflows, as the Asian experience shows. The gender distribution of cross-border migration obviously matters because women migrating for work face very different conditions from those of men migrants, whether in the source country, or in the process of travel or in the destination country. These are crucially affected by the gender construction as well as the nature of labour markets in both societies of origin and destination. This is well accepted and now quite widely studied. However, the macroeconomic…

The big-ticket item in the “Interim Budget 2019-20” was the announcement of a cash transfer to farmers holding less than 2 hectares, of Rs 6,000 per household to be paid in three instalments of Rs 2,000 each. Estimated to cover around 120 million households, it is projected to cost Rs 75,000 crore over a year. Amazingly, the government also declared that it is providing this amount with retrospective effect from 1 December 2018, so that the first instalment would reach farmers’ bank accounts by end March of the current financial year. Finance Minister Piyush Goyal stated that he has put…

Jayati Ghosh points out that “mainstream economics has operated in the service of power”, which has made the subject less relevant and reduced its legitimacy and credibility. Economics needs to become more open to criticism of assumptions, methods, and results. For full article Click Here (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on February 14, 2019)

Everyone expected the Modi government to do something big – or at least promise something big – before the general elections. Everyone also sensed that it would be something to do with farmers, one of the economic and social concerns that has now also become a political talking point. But perhaps no one expected that the government would dare to make massive budgetary commitments for the coming year in a Vote on Account (or Interim Budget), which is constitutionally outside the mandate of an outgoing government. A Vote on Account is only supposed to include spending measures for the immediate…

Unbelievable but true: there is nothing – repeat, nothing at all – in the Budget to deal with the job crisis. This is crazy, since lack of employment (especially for the young) and the problems in agriculture have emerged as the biggest two problems in the Indian economy and society today. It is also politically tone-deaf, since the government should really have been on the back foot on this one, as its suppression of official jobs data (the NSSO Survey of 2017-18) cleared by the National Statistical Commission, had just been exposed. In the circumstances, it was only to be…

The attacks by the Modi government on many of India's institutions have been noted, but the destruction of India’s statistical system was not adequately recognised or condemned. That is, not until the latest revelations on how the Government is refusing to release the NSSO’s employment survey for 2017-18 led to the resignation of the last two remaining independent Members of the National Statistical Commission. This attack on official statistics is obviously important, because it denies citizens access to reliable data on what is going on in the economy and assess the government’s performance. It is sad, because India had managed…