Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

The Government of India’s Economic Survey 2022-23 is a bizarre document. It uses cherry-picked time series data to suggest that the performance of the Indian economy has been commendable only during the current Modi government’s tenure and the previous NDA government led by AB Vajpayee. The conversion of all trends—including macroeconomic processes—into vehicles for promoting political agendas, is unfortunate, because if official policies are really to operate for the benefit of the Indian people, it is important to recognize the realities, rather than see everything as a vehicle for propaganda. That actual trends are being ignored is apparent, as the…

The annual budget is generally supposed to be a statement of not only the Union government’s actual and proposed revenue raising and spending plans, but also of its general economic policy intent. If so, the indications this year are chilling. It seems that the Narendra Modi government has decided, in an election year, that general elections can be fought and won without efforts to improve the material conditions of the bulk of the people, and even simply ignoring their suffering. (Presumably other strategies are to be used for the coming elections.) Instead, the focus of the government will be on…

We all know that the Narendra Modi government has strong centralising tendencies — not just between the Centre and the state governments but even within Central ministries, with the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministry of home affairs being the loci of real power. We also know that with the closure of the Planning Commission and the effective disbanding of the Inter-State Council (the last meeting of which was held in 2016), state governments have lacked a platform on which to bring their concerns and voice their views on crucial matters of economic policy that affect them. State governments accounted…

This was never going to be an easy Union Budget to present for any finance minister, even before last week. Despite all the hype about a resurgent Indian economy, almost all the indicators that matter suggested that economic conditions were far from positive. The only big exception was the stock market, which had been performing well beyond anything that could be justified by actual earnings or immediate prospects. That was one of the indicators constantly trumpeted by the government’s official spokespersons, who suggested that this was an indication of the faith that domestic and foreign investors have in the potential…

Professor Jayati Ghosh is one of the world's most prominent living development economists and a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her voluminous research output spans gender perspectives on development, theories of economic growth, Indian macroeconomic policy, and environmental economics, among over 200 papers and 20 books. In 2022 she published Earth For All: A Survival Guide for Humanity, coauthored by the Club of Rome’s Transformational Economics Commission. In March 2022, she was appointed to the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, mandated to provide a vision for international cooperation to deal with current…

To mitigate the worst effects of climate change and prevent societal breakdown, we must shift to renewable energies and reduce extreme inequality. But doing so would require massive increases in public spending, which is why governments must overhaul their outdated and regressive tax systems. The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, has always been more than a little problematic. But in recent years, the annual gathering of the rich and powerful has become an increasingly wasteful exercise in vanity. What is the point of all those private jets, luxury hotels, and clinking champagne glasses if they lead to…