Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years, and since January 2021 she has been Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She has received several prizes, including the 2023 Galbraith Award from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), 2015 Adisheshaiah Award for distinguished contributions to the social sciences in India; the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2011; and the NordSud Prize for Social Sciences 2010, Italy. She has advised governments in India and other countries, including as Chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Commission on Farmers’ Welfare…

At long last, the International Monetary Fund has begun to recognize that the best way to reduce sovereign debt is by boosting economic growth, rather than insisting on fiscal retrenchment. But this new understanding is being undermined by a lingering adherence to growth-inhibiting austerity policies. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on March 19, 2023)

Excerpt from the interview of the Indian economist Jayati Ghosh granted to Global News on 3/21/2023, in which she defends the increase in public investment in the Brazilian economy.

Amid the growing enthusiasm for carbon border taxes, Western policymakers have largely ignored the negative impact on the world’s poorest countries. For carbon-pricing policies to succeed, developed countries must show their commitment to shared prosperity by enabling knowledge-sharing and fostering equitable climate finance. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on March 16, 2023)

Well over half of all workers in India are self-employed. The proportions of self-employed workers are significantly higher in rural areas, and among women. In rural areas, it is presumed that it is the dominance of small-scale agriculture that leads to more self-employment, but in fact self-employed workers are around half of those engaged in non-agricultural employment as well. Even in urban areas, those working without any defined employer account for around two-fifths of male workers and more than one-third of the proportion of women in some form of paid employment. Remember that self-employment in most cases in India (other…

In her 2022 book, The Making of a Catastrophe (Aleph), on the disastrous economic fallout of COVID-19, Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh writes that job losses and food insecurity were significantly higher for women. As in many other countries, she pointed out that the lockdown in India was also associated with significant increases in complaints of domestic violence on women. She also noted that women’s labour market participation, which had been falling from already low levels since 1993, experienced further sharp declines. In an interview with The Hindu, Ghosh talks about gender blindness of official policies, inequalities in society, the…

For Sri Lanka to emerge from the present crisis, is it enough to follow the current path of restructuring debt? The speakers at this event will share prescriptions from different paradigms, for how Sri Lanka can improve on its current path of economic recovery. They will present views and engage with each other on how they would prioritise specific structural corrections at a local and at a global level to provide Sri Lanka with a better set of solutions. Ishac Diwan is the Research Director of the Finance for Development Lab at the Paris School of Economics and is currently…