Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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…

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…