Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

The economic forces underlying Brexit—and the election of Donald Trump in the US—are similar, but also well advanced in many European countries, where much of the population faces similar material insecurity and stagnation. These frustrations can easily be channelled by right-wing xenophobic forces. To combat this, the EU needs to undo some of its design flaws and move from austerity to a more flexible union based on the solidarity of its people. Brexit (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally posted in the Taylor and Francis online on June 2, 2017)

Distressed farmers are demanding loan waivers, but that should not deflect attention from what needs to be done and undone to address the roots of the agrarian crisis.Crop_Prices Crop_Prices (Download the full text in PDF format) ( This article was originally published in the Business Line on June 19, 2017.)

It is a truism of history that rising powers tend to be the ones valorising “free” trade and more open and integrated national economies, just as waning powers tend to turn inwards. So it is no surprise that over the past half year, as the United States elected a President with an avowedly protectionist agenda (even if relatively little has been acted upon so far), China’s President has become the chief advocate of globalisation and more extensive trade and investment links across countries. This drumbeat reached a crescendo in mid-May 2017, at a summit in Beijing to celebrate the official…

National income is hard to estimate in India where so much activity and employment is in the informal sector. Much of GDP calculation is not purely “technocratic” but relies on judgments and assumptions. As long as our system of national accounting does not clarify the real impact on the economy and the actual degree of deceleration of economic activity, we will remain in the dark. GDP_Elephant (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in Quatrz India: June 5, 2017)

Even the limited and unsteady recovery of growth in the US a decade after the 2008 crisis is based on an increase in debt that renders it unsustainable. Unsustainable_US_recovery (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in the Business Line on June 5, 2017)

As the US reduces its role as engine of global demand, there are no signs that other economies will be able to pick up the slack. The mercantilist approach exemplified by Germany is creating net global slowdown. Global_Demand (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in the Business Line on May 22, 2017)

Recent trends in the organisational form of units in the registered manufacturing sector suggest that India’s factory sector is not just abnormal but backward to boot. Lopsided_Industrialisation  (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally posted in the Business Line on May 8, 2017)

Despite the government's efforts to digitise the Indian economy forcibly, non-cash forms of payment appear to have declined as more currency has been made available to the public. This points to major flaws in the government's coercive approach and the underlying rationale for cashlessness. De_Digitisation_India  (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in the Business Line on April 24, 2017.)

After four decades of financial reform China’s banking sector is still dominated by publicly owned institutions. But continuity in ownership does not mean that banking behaviour does not change. Chinese_Banking (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in the Business Line on April 10, 2017)

It is commonplace to note that women tend to have low status and little autonomy over much of Indian society. This is reflected in many distressing features that have persisted and even intensified in recent years despite all the talk of modernisation: the low and falling rates of female participation in recognised employment; adverse child sex ratios that appear to be even worse among more well-off groups; increases in recorded cases of violence against women. But there is one very startling feature that gets relatively little attention: the continuing prevalence of child marriage across most parts of the country. According…