Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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.…

In India, we tend to obsess a lot about the growth rate of national income, worrying if it drops even a tenth of a percentage point below market expectations, and checking fiscal and monetary indicators with respect to the value of the national product. By contrast, we worry much less about the quality of that growth, or even its sectoral distribution. But surely the latter is more important, both for the conditions of people and the overall health of the economy now and in the future. Consider how the different productive sectors have grown in terms of real value added…

The bank frauds involving Punjab National Bank (PNB) and the companies associated with businessmen Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi as well as the Rotomac case couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Indian banking system is already reeling under the pressure of growing NPAs, or non-performing assets (less politely known as loans that are not going to be repaid), which will touch nearly ₹10 lakh crore by March this year. This does not include the ₹6 lakh crore already written-off. This has already caused a slowdown in disbursal of bank credit, in turn affecting productive investment. Failure at many…

Forget the massive and overblown promises to farmers and on health insurance, which were not covered by any budgetary provisions.  Ignore the supposed increases in rural development spending, which are all to be met through “extra-budgetary and non-budgetary sources”. Disregard the declared concern for rural areas, the poor and women, which has translated into next to nothing in terms of actual allocations. The real story of this Union Budget is not to be found in the verbose rhetoric of the Finance Minister’s speech or in the supposedly “big ticket” items, which amount more to a manifesto of the ruling party…

Has the Union Ministry of Finance really turned gender-sensitive at last? At least according to its own lights, it has. Indeed, the creators of the Economic Survey are so excited by this new perspective that they have been moved to colour the cover of their document pink. (Presumably, no one has yet told them about how such colour stereotyping is no longer fashionable.) And – instead of the usual practice of clubbing together matters relating to women with children, social sectors and other supposedly “soft” stuff – there is an entire chapter in volume I of the Survey devoted to gender and specifically…

This government is especially good at optics, at managing public perceptions to persuade people that it is working for them, rather than doing so. So it is no surprise that Arun Jaitley’s pre-election Budget Speech went on about how much his government cares for the people, the poor, for farmers, for women, for people running small and micro enterprises, and so on. Many major claims were made: not just about the recent past, but about the coming fiscal year, with supposedly massive increases in public spending that would be directed towards these hitherto-ignored categories of people. But the actual increases…

For those with short memories, let’s remind ourselves that Arun Jaitley has been promising “top priority to farmers” for a while now. Indeed, this government came to power in 2014 promising to double farmers’ incomes in five years. Four years later, that goal post has been shifted, with all official documents now declaring that farmers’ incomes will be doubled by 2022, as per a “clarion call” given by Prime Minister Modi supposedly in 2017.  In fact, in Budget 2016-17, the Finance Minister had already announced a slew of measures that were supposed to double farmers’ incomes in five years, to…

This Debate contribution describes the promotion of digital rather than cash payments as a form of the financialization of finance, in its role as a payments system, with reference to recent Indian experience. The obsession with digital transactions as a marker of social and material progress is misplaced; it may become yet another means by which finance extracts rentier incomes out of relatively poor populations. Financialisation_Finance (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally posted in the Wiley Online Library)