Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

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)