Jayati Ghosh’s Blog

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

 In the Democratizing Work plenary keynote session, chaired by Adelle Blackett, Jayati Ghosh discussed The Relevance of Decommodifying Work for People and the Planet. For More Details Click Here

Feminist economists have long argued that the purpose of an economy is to support the survival and flourishing of life, in all its forms. This may seem obvious but it turns on its head the prevailing view, which implicitly assumes the opposite causation: the economy runs according to its own laws, which must be respected by mere human actors. In this market-fundamentalist perspective, it is a potential angry god which can deliver prosperity or devastation and must be placated through all sorts of measures—including sacrifices made in its name. Yet the economy, its markets and its various institutional forms are…

Global leaders, especially in the developed world, still fail to grasp the gravity of the climate challenge. Although they acknowledge its severity in their speeches, they mostly pursue short-term national interests, without clear and immediate commitments to act. Click here for full article. (This article was originally published in the Project Syndicate on November 15, 2021)