Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

We are increasingly in an economy in which policy making occurs as shooting into the dark, simply because we no longer have so much of the data that are essential for any public intervention. The collapse of the most essential statistical information in a country that pioneered the collection and evaluation of economic and other data in largely informal economic settings is more than troubling. It amounts to not just a tragic decline in a once-proud statistical system, but a real obstruction to any evidence-based policy making, and even a lack of awareness of the actual conditions of the Indian…

The Research Intelligence Unit (RIUNIT) hosted a webinar 'Lessons from Sri Lanka's Sovereign Debt Crisis' aimed at drawing international lessons from the current economic crises.

Recently, a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court put forth the idea of setting up an expert committee that could recommend ways to protect common investors from market events. The court’s recommendation came soon after the stocks of the companies of the Adani Group crashed following a report by Hindenburg Research, a U.S.-based investment research firm. It is estimated that the fall in the Adani Group’s stocks has cost investors over $100 billion. Can investments be free of risk? Jayati Ghosh and Anand Srinivasan discuss the question in a conversation moderated by Prashanth Perumal J What is the fundamental nature of risk in markets, and why do returns vary based on risk?…

Over the past two decades, Indian multi-billionaire Gautam Adani’s close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi have helped the Gujarati businessman become Asia’s wealthiest person. Adani’s meteoric rise, which in some ways eclipsed that of his political mentor, also made him the poster boy for India’s growth story until allegations of fraud and stock manipulation brought his eponymous business empire to its knees. With his conglomerate losing $110 billion in market value within days, Adani has become a cautionary tale about the perils of cronyism in Modi’s India. The partnership between Adani and Modi goes back to 2002, when Modi…

Dr. Jayati Ghosh opened the lecture by noting that developing Asia is often presented as the success story of globalization, yet its links to global markets have changed over the decades. The early success stories of globalization were those of the newly industrializing countries su including Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Then came China and the ASEAN-4 that experienced export-led growth. Since the 2000s, the focus has shifted to their integration in global capital markets as a means of economic diversification and to expand global financial services and related activities. In this light, a key feature of Asian…

Feminist Economics 101: Jayati Ghosh interviewed by Muzna Alvi on new frontiers in development, international trade, and labor economics from a feminist lens This event took place on January 23, 2023. The new Feminist Economics 101 online event series is a continuation of the series featured in the 2021 pre-conference. These one-hour sessions feature interviews of senior scholars by young or early career scholars about their work and key concepts in feminist economics. This series was developed to provide an interactive dialogue between young and senior scholars by including a Q&A session and the opportunity for senior scholars to pose…