Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

There are many reasons to worry about and to be anguished by the communalisation of Indian politics and society that has proceeded apace over the last few decades. There is the general coarsening of the public discourse, which increasingly gets driven by prejudice and rumour rather than fact. There is the increase in both subtle and open forms of discrimination, typically directed by members of the majority community against the minority community, but often expressed against the “other” whenever that person or group is perceived as being weaker. There is the hardening of positions within communities, with hard-line stances in…

An analysis of India's ICT performance suggests that software export success tends to hide both imbalances in production and their adverse balance of payments fall-out. ICT  (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published in the Business Line on March 13, 2017)

What makes for a “Romantic” sensibility? Not in the literal sense of being inclined to “romance”, but in the sense of the movement that subsequently became a tradition in 19th century literature and the arts in Europe, when this sensibility permeated much creative endeavour. Romanticism has generally been associated with an emphasis on emotion and a celebration of subjectivity in terms of the individual’s response to the world; a glorification of nature, as well as of the past; in many ways a cultural expression of the reaction to the standardisation and rule-bound socio-economic patterns created by the Industrial Revolution. But…