Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

Jayati Ghosh critiques and details the conceptual, methodological and empirical problems in defining and measuring productivity, the “holy grail” of economic growth. Productivity measurement encounters problems in both its numerator (output) and the denominator (input). While output measured as GDP doesn’t account for informal/intangible goods and services, the use of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rates over Market Exchange Rates (MER) limits meaningful comparison across countries, specifically by overstating the incomes of poorer countries. This is apart from fundamental flaws in the wide usage of labour productivity, as evidenced during the pandemic when labour productivity rose as output fell, but overall…

There is no doubt that creative industries, along with care activities, are going to emerge as some of the most significant economic sectors of the future. Broadly speaking, the creative industries consist of advertising, architecture, arts and crafts, design, fashion, film, video, photography, music, performing arts, publishing, research & development, software, computer games, electronic publishing, and TV/radio. A 2019 report from by UNCTAD (Creative Economy Outlook 2019, Geneva: UNCTAD) notes how these activities are valuable in both cultural and commercial terms. Obviously, they improve human and social well-being, and as expressions of the human imagination, bring joy, meaning and fulfilment…

More frequent and intense heat waves are poised to become bigger killers in the Indian subcontinent than the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But the government is essentially leaving people to fend for themselves in a foreseeable tragedy, and envisages continued investment in fossil fuels for decades to come. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on May 11, 2022)

The latest IPCC report makes it clear: the planet is now dangerously close to a tipping point and reliance on fossil fuels has to be drastically curtailed and even fully eliminated soon, to avoid catastrophic climate changes. Obviously, this urgent call fell on deaf ears where it matters. It didn’t take long, or even very much, for world leaders—especially those who should really know better and have the means to do otherwise—to renege on their very recent pledges to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. The latest excuse for avoiding the most basic inconvenient truths is the outcome of the Russian…

Inflation has become a problem in India once again, well before it emerged globally and in the advanced countries as a major concern. In India, inflation rates of 6 per cent and above were evident even during the pandemic collapse, when much of the rest of the world suffered deflation. This was largely due to cost-push pressures resulting from the central government’s continuous increases in fuel taxes, which effectively increased the costs of producing and transporting goods and services. Since then, and especially since the Ukraine war, global prices of fuel and other commodities (including food crops like wheat) have…

Testimony to US House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, Sub Committee on National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy, Virtual Hearing on February 17, 2022. The Covid-19 epidemic has widened the disparities between affluent and poor countries (other than China).  Most developing nations are dealing with a substantially harsher external environment, and their resources are now even more limited than before. This has already resulted in decreased employment, major increases in poverty and hunger, and poor economic prospects for the near future. This process inhibits the increase of global effective demand, limiting the possibility of global economic recovery. To…

It is obvious that the Covid-19 pandemic has had a deep, searing impact on the Indian economy, in terms of both total economic activity and livelihoods. It is true that the economy had been struggling for several years before then, with falling investment and employment, sharply growing inequalities and worsening conditions of health and nutrition. But the pandemic and the policy response led to sharp aggravation of all of these problems. As Figure 1 show, per capita income in real terms, whether measured as GDP per person or as net national income per person (which is GDP after subtracting taxes…

India is an outlier in terms of low government spending during the pandemic, as we noted last month in an earlier article. Unlike advanced economies and even most developing and emerging market economies, the Indian government did not ramp up public spending to enable its population to cope with the public health disaster and the massive livelihood losses resulting from a mishandled pandemic. Instead, as we showed, central government spending actually declined in the pandemic year 2020-21, according to the government’s own report to the IMF. Now that the Union Budget for 2022-23 is soon to be presented, the concerns…

Through out the continuing pandemic, the Indian government’s fiscal reticence has made it a significant outlier in the world. Advanced economies have gone all out in terms of expanded public spending. Their governments quickly abandoned the (flawed) arguments about the dangers of large fiscal deficits, when large capitalists realised that they would also suffer from the closures and downturns created by the spread of the coronavirus. Even governments in developing countries constrained by external debt overhang and fear of capital flight increased their spending despite declining revenues, both to provide some relief and social protection to their populations, and to…

 In the first lecture of the lecture series on "Gender and Prosperity in Asia" organized by the Institute of Global Prosperity (IGP) at University College London, Jayati Ghosh discusses "How Asia's Growth has Relied on Women's Paid and Unpaid Labor". For More Details Click Here