Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

It has long been known that the very wealthy are able to shift their assets abroad and stash them away in tax havens and other jurisdictions. There are various reasons for doing this: to hide ill-gotten gains, to avoid or evade taxation, to insure against currency depreciation and otherwise hedge bets about likely economic performance in India. Much of this knowledge, however, was just based on anecdotal evidence or the occasional release of data provided by leaks like those of the Panama Papers. Now, however, we finally have more systematic attempts to measure and assess the extent of such illicit…

The many ways in which rich people and global companies can avoid tax have been quite widely known for some time. Periodically, information from leaks, such as the Panama Papers, creates public outrage and some (albeit often halfhearted) attempts by tax authorities to deal with at least some of the disclosures. But the full extent of such evasion and its global spread have been hard to assess, given its insidious nature, due to lack of data. Matters have though recently improved, with more information becoming available and more researchers willing to sift carefully through it. A landmark new Global Tax Evasion report from…

The latest Annual Report of the Periodic Labour Force Survey, covering July 2022 to June 2023, has some interesting results. On the face of it, there seems to be some improvement in the labour market, as expressed in the declining unemployment rate. Figure 1 shows that the unemployment rate has fallen from a high of 6 per cent in 2017-18, to 3.2 per cent in 2022-23, which is much closer to the historical norm for India. Figure 1. Source for all data: NSSO, Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report 2022-23. The unemployment rate reflects the difference between labour force participation…

India has a robust and admired statistical system. But the government is suppressing data to suit its narrative. It is perilous not to know the reality of the governed No government in India has been as adept in shaping the political narrative as the Modi government since 2014. This has been accomplished through a domination of most of the mainstream media, significant control over social media, ruthless intimidation and repression of dissident voices, and reliance on a web of disseminators on the ground. A critical aspect of this has been the ability to control, manipulate and suppress official data in…

Regulating financial activity in global commodities markets, while important, is not enough to stave off rising food insecurity. Policymakers must also take measures to help developing countries build up reserves of essential items and cope with price fluctuations, possibly through a publicly administered virtual reserve mechanism. Among the multiple crises that have erupted around the world, the avoidable tragedy of growing hunger receives only fleeting mention. And any attention that it does attract is apparently not enough to prompt global policymakers to act. Yet a new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations makes for…

The sovereign debt crises confronting many low and middle income countries is now common knowledge and is frequently referred to by global policy makers—even though remarkably little is being done by the international powers-that-be to resolve these crises. The general presumption is that many of these countries experienced dramatically increased sovereign (external) debt stress because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is seen to have inevitably caused public revenues to fall because of lockdowns and the impact of the disease, even as public spending had to increase for the very same reasons. Low and middle income countries are then seen as…

More than a year after the mass protest movement known as the Aragalaya ousted Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lankans have once again taken to the streets. The impetus for the resurgence of public discontent is the recent bailout agreement between the International Monetary Fund and President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s government. The deal, which aims to address the country’s ongoing balance-of-payments crisis, offers Sri Lanka less than $3 billion over four years – a tiny fraction of what the country needs to meet its debt-servicing requirements and just one-sixth of its foreign-exchange earnings,…

At the upcoming UN Summit of the Future, the proposed Pact for the Future could generate the necessary political will for countries to commit to a just green transition. Low- and middle-income countries, in particular, could negotiate for fairer multilateral agreements and new financing mechanisms to address climate change. Our collective future hinges on a transformative shift in our relationship with the planet. This week, during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, negotiations will begin at the ministerial level to plan the Summit of the Future in 2024. Coming together to save our common home must be at the…

The dramatic increase in global oil and food prices from the start of the Ukraine War did not reflect real global supply shortages or demand-supply imbalances. Rather, it reflected the impact of market concentration and financial activity in commodity futures markets, which enabled some large private players particularly global agribusinesses and financial companies to make a killing. This is now so evident from the data that it is more widely acknowledged. The agricultural commodity that was most affected by the Ukraine war is wheat. Wheat prices in global trade surged from January to June 2022, then fell, so that by…