Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

It is quite amazing that Karl Marx's Capital has survived and been continuously in print for the past century and a half. After all, this big, unwieldy book (more than 2000 pages of small print in three fat volumes) still has sections that are evidently incomplete. Even in the best translations, the writing is dense and difficult, constantly veering off into tangential points and pedantic debates with now unknown writers. The ideas are complex and cannot be understood quickly. In any case, the book aims to describe economic and social reality in 19th-century northwestern Europe - surely a context very…

Data on organised manufacturing production do not really capture the impact of demonetisation and its effects on demand, but looking at some sub-sectors of consumer non-durable goods provides more insight. Indian_Manufacturing (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in the Business Line on August 14, 2017.)

We may be living through one of those moments in history that future historians will look back on as a watershed, a period of flux that marked a transition to quite different economic and social arrangements. Unfortunately, in human history a ‘moment’ can be a very long time, so long that it could be decades before the final shape of the new arrangements are even evident; and in the interim, there could be many ‘dead cat bounces’ of the current system. What is clear is that the established order – broadly defined as neoliberal globalised finance capitalism – is no…

GDP growth figures for the last few years have camouflaged a deceleration in credit growth that has affected all but the retail loans segment quite adversely. Credit_Squeeze (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in the Business Line on July 31, 2017.)

Meetings of global leaders – such as recently occurred in the G20 meeting at Hamburg – increasingly have a ring of farce about them. The inability to come to agreement on pretty much anything of significance is leavened only by sideshows and media obsession with which global leader met with whom for how long, who sat in for which President at the “high table”, and similar trivia. Meanwhile, there is abject failure on the part of these leaders to recognize the pressing need for urgent and co-ordinated global action to solve so many current problems, ranging from the terrible state…

Trends in social relations are both affected by and impact upon economic changes. These in turn have an important bearing on desirable patterns of spending in the care economy, as suggested by an examination of recent marital trends in Europe. Demography_Europe (Download the full text in PDF format) ( This article was originally published in the Business Line on July 17, 2017.)

In a time of short or no historical memory, it is easy to believe that some ideas are completely novel and innovative. So it is with the idea of the “Universal Basic Income”, which is getting much exposure in both developed and developing countries as a fundamentally new policy to deal with contemporary inequalities and the increasing uncertainty around employment generation. I have already considered some of the advantages and concerns with this idea, specifically in the Indian context, in a previous column (http://www.frontline.in/columns/Jayati_Ghosh/a-universal-basic-income-in-india/article9511636.ece). But it is worth looking in more detail at the history of this idea, and some…

Has China's labour market reached a point where long years of high growth have led to demand outstripping supply, resulting in a sharp rise in wages? China_Labour (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in the Business Line on July 4, 2017.)

It is a truth that should now be universally acknowledged that, everywhere in the world, our lives are driven by computers – or more specifically, by the workings of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and therefore the internet. And our dependence on them is not just temporary or partial: it is continuous and overwhelming. It is not just people who actively use computers – whether on desktops or laptops or tablets or mobile telephones – whose lives are driven by them and by internet access. Increasingly, (and certainly in urban areas) almost all forms of transport, most forms of financial…

Calls for a new development paradigm grow louder each day, especially in rapidly growing countries like India. Award-winning development economist Jayati Ghosh explores prospects for such a new model of equitable and sustainable development with Allen White, Senior Fellow at the Tellus Institute. What drew you to the field of development economics? I was interested in how societies function and how social change occurs, so I began by studying sociology. But it seemed that this discipline just skimmed the surface, that deeper underlying economic contexts and processes were crucial for understanding social change, and that without such knowledge, much would…