Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

With the GDP estimates for the fourth quarter of 2017-18 placing growth relative to the corresponding quarter of the previous year at 7.7 per cent, talk of India being the world’s fastest growing economy has revived. Moreover, since the year-on-year quarterly growth rates have risen from 5.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2017-18 to 6.3, 7.0 and 7.7 per cent in the subsequent three-quarters, there is talk that India is once more on a trajectory of accelerating growth (Chart 1). However, the story emerging from the provisional annual figures (which are also now available) is at variance with…

The news last week that prices of Brent Crude oil (which is used as a global benchmark) had crossed $80 a barrel in some markets must have created shock waves in policy circles of many countries, especially India. Many oil-importing countries had grown comfortable with – and even complacent about – the relatively low oil prices that persisted after their precipitous drop in the middle of 2014. As Chart 1 shows, average oil prices feel very sharply after June 2014, falling by 56 per cent just in the months until January 2015, and by more than 70 per cent from…

For those who were victimised or isolated for dissident views, of whatever description, there was a special place in Ashok Mitra's heart. (The Bengali version of this article is being published in Arek Rakam, a journal that Ashok Mitra helped set up as its first editor.) It is a privilege to be able to write about Ashok Mitra in the journal that was probably the last love of his life. In a way, the very existence of Arek Rakam describes much about the man himself and his extraordinary capacities. Think of someone already into his ninth decade, having the enthusiasm and energy to…

There are some people who are hard to classify, in terms of achievement or contribution to society or personality, and Ashok Mitra is one of them. Economist, policymaker, writer, organic intellectual, politician, litterateur, legislator: he has been all of these at different times, and often several of them together. In a remarkable life spanning nearly nine decades, he has also shown an amazing ability to integrate the personal and the political, the individual and the social, and the emotional and the rational in ways that express both the contradictions and the sublimity of being truly human. But even among these…

Ashok Mitra was one of the most remarkable personalities of Independent India. A polymath who spanned technical economics, literature, policy and politics, he brought to all of these his distinctive flair, razor-sharp intelligence, and enormous energy and passion. His death — in Kolkata on Tuesday after almost a month’s stay in hospital for diarrhoea and later respiratory problems — marks the end of multiple eras, as he was the last surviving member of several significant groups: the influential progressive economists who in the 1950s laid the groundwork for economic strategies of the subsequent decades; the founder trustees of the Economic Weekly (later Economic…

It is difficult to write about those whom you love. Curiously enough, the difficulty is not only because of the fear of excessive partiality: it is also because love brings with it the freedom to be exasperated. And intimacy creates very complex and textured perceptions, often too nuanced to be easily captured in mere words. That is why, when this book of memoirs (A Prattler’s Tale: Bengal, Marxism, Governance, Samya, Kolkata 2007) by Ashok Mitra, came into my hands, I was at first reluctant to write about it. But the author was and is so much more than the recipient…

If there has been one big change in the nature of the global economy in the second decade of this century, it is in global trade. In the first decade of this century, especially in the period 2002-08, cross-border trade grew much more rapidly than total world output, and the integration of countries through greater exchange of goods and services essentially became the primary engine of growth. It is true that the explosion of financial activity that has become such a prominent feature of contemporary capitalism also added substantially to income growth – and indeed generated the bubbles that were…

In discussions of global inequality, there is general agreement that, whatever else may have happened, within-country inequality has increased in most cases, even as between-country inequality has come down. But overall, because of the recent emergence of countries with large populations like China and India, there has actually been some reduction in global inequality, because of increasing incomes in the “middle” of the global distribution. Chart 1 shows that, whether measured by the Gini coefficient (a measure of the dispersion of incomes of the population) or the Palma ratio (the ratio of the share of income of the top ten…

Across the country, farmers are furious – and rightfully so. Four years ago, they helped bring the BJP to power, believing Narendra Modi’s claims that they would no longer suffer official neglect. Cultivators were promised a doubling of their incomes in five years and many policies to increase their productivity and reduce their costs and risks. But since then, conditions in agriculture have got worse rather than better. Earlier problems have worsened as farm incomes have been squeezed by slower output growth, higher costs and increased vulnerability to changing climate. And there is a slew of new problems resulting directly…

For more than two years now, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has been in a state of turmoil. There is reason to conclude that this turmoil is no accident: it is the result of a set of decisions imposed from above that appear to be aimed at undermining the fundamental nature of this university and all that it has stood for. The fact that these decisions and actions are being adopted by those supposedly in charge of protecting and nurturing this institution - the Vice Chancellor since January 2016 and the administration that he has appointed - is particularly alarming.…