Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

The webinar "Decoding the New Global Financing Pact Summit: Critical reflection from the lens of climate, debt and tax justice" took place on 26 June 2023. On 22-23 June, world leaders, representatives of financial institutions and private sectors and CSOs are gathering in Paris for the New Global Financing Pact Summit, convened by President Macron in response to the Bridgetown Initiative. It calls for an overhaul of the international financial system to fight inequalities, finance the climate transition and bring us closer to achieving the SDGs. The webinar critically assessed the outcomes of New Global Financing Pact (to be held…

Abstract The title of this article is a riff off a publication of G. C. Harcourt’s 1974 piece, ‘The social consequences of inflation’. He wrote this in a period of the global economy that bears some strong similarities to our own contemporary phase when inflation is suddenly back in the global headlines. There is at least one significant difference: at that time, Harcourt highlighted inflation as the outcome of an excess of total demand in real terms over available supplies of goods and services when the potential workforces and existing stocks of capital goods were fully employed. Current inflationary pressures,…

High global prices of food items, especially essential food grains, have terrible consequences around the world, with those living in lower-income food-importing countries typically the worst affected. It is often assumed that when such prices rise, it is the result of changing supply conditions for example, changing climate patterns that affect sowing and harvest, or particular shocks (like the Ukraine War) that reduce production and exports of major exporting countries, or affect transport links between exporting and importing countries. There is no doubt that these can indeed be factors, but in fact their significance tends to be greatly overplayed. Indeed,…

The upcoming Paris Summit on a New Financing Pact once again shines a spotlight on the so-called financing gap. According to an early concept note for the Summit: “Developing countries have large developmental needs and face huge financing gaps due to limited access to international markets, as well as inadequate financing mechanisms including limited concessional finance, hampering their ability to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its goals as well as the climate goals.” Such a declaration aligns with the mainstream narrative that – given the insufficiency of official development assistance (ODA), climate finance and public finance more…

Making the global food system more sustainable and equitable represents a huge and complex undertaking that necessarily involves difficult trade-offs. The tension between responding to short-term increases in fertilizer prices and implementing long-term strategies for combating climate change is a case in point. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on June 15, 2023)

Insufficient economic diversification, from low value added to higher value added activities, has been one of the important failures of the Indian development trajectory. Despite decades of relatively high growth of GDP, most of the work force remains trapped in low-value employment in agriculture and other primary activities, along with low-paying services. This pattern is unlike the successful late industrializers like Japan, South Korea and more recently China. The continuing preponderance of workers in primary activities in India is also unlike most middle-income countries at present. In the rural economy in particular, the slow pace of diversification has created an…

The renowned development economist, Jayati Ghosh, offers an eye-opening perspective on the different facets of inequality and the need for systemic change to address them, bringing together her interests in international trade and finance, employment patterns in developing countries, as well as issues related to gender and development. Ghosh argues for the need to redress the power imbalances which are reinforcing socially irrational and unjust policies. Through the prisms of gender inequality, social discrimination, and the global power dynamics between countries, Ghosh looks at how relational inequality impacts the ability of individuals or groups to influence the actions of others,…

At first sight, treaties preventing double taxation appear to be self-evidently fair: why should any individual or company pay taxes twice over, on the same income? Income taxes are typically collected by local or national tax authorities on incomes earned within their jurisdiction but complications arise when these stem from traded goods and services or arise in a context of cross-border mobility particularly foreign investment. Double-taxation treaties, typically bilateral, purportedly resolve competing claims to tax revenue from cross-border investments between home and destination countries. And such treaties are widely accepted, without much question, by governments and publics alike. But, as…

It is well known that several countries of Latin America are among the most unequal in the world, in terms of both income and asset distribution. There are many political economy forces leading to such inequality, but what makes matters much worse in much of Latin America is that fiscal policy has effectively added to this by being complex and regressive at the same time. As a result, in some of the major economies of the region, the distribution of disposable income (after taxes and transfers/subsidies) is hardly very different from the initial unequal distribution of pretax incomes. The important…

Could you first tell us what brought you down the path of becoming a development economist and specifically researching global inequality? “Well, if you grow up in India, you’re always aware of both lack of development and inequality because they’re so all-pervasive, but I actually started studying sociology because I was interested in society. However, I realized that I wasn’t getting a lot of the real forces that make these disparities, so that’s why I switched to economics. After decades of doing economics, I now feel that you can’t understand the economy without looking at society. I believe that we…