Prabhat Patnaik’s Blog

Several international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call “poverty”. The World Bank has been in it for some time, but now we have a new measure of “Multidimensional Poverty” brought out by the UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Neither of these measures however actually measures poverty; they typically end up “prettifying” neo-liberal capitalism. In fact according to the World Bank’s estimate, the proportion of the world’s population that lives in “extreme poverty” (that is, below a daily per capita expenditure of $1.90 at 2011 purchasing power parity exchange rate)…

The fact that the world economy has slowed down since the financial crisis of 2008 is beyond dispute. In fact even conservative American economists have started using the term “secular stagnation” to describe the current situation (though they have their own peculiar definition for it). The purpose of the present note is to give some growth-rate figures to establish this particular point. Calculations of GDP, which are notoriously unreliable for particular countries, are even more so for the world as a whole. In India many researchers have questioned the official estimates of the growth rate of GDP, and have suggested…

West Africa, which had been largely under French colonial rule, never saw decolonisation of the sort that India did. For a start, the erstwhile French colonies’ currency continued to be linked to the French franc at a fixed exchange rate, which meant that they could not pursue any fiscal and monetary policy of their choice (for that would have threatened the fixed exchange rate). Not only were their foreign exchange reserves kept by France, as had been the case with colonial India where its gold reserves, acquired through enforced borrowing (since all its annual export surplus earnings were taken by…

During the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in conformity with the wishes of the electorate. True, it is not that the governments first ascertain popular wishes, and then decide on policy; the conformity between the two is typically ensured under bourgeois rule by the government deciding on policies in accordance with ruling class interests, and then having a propaganda machinery that persuades the people about the wisdom of…

During Modi’s visit to Ukraine (why he visited Ukraine at all at the present time remains a mystery), Zelensky asked India not to purchase fuel from Russia in violation of western sanctions, that is, to fall in line with the “unilateral” western sanctions. Let us for a moment forget the identity of the person making this suggestion, the fact that he rules Ukraine with the help of the followers of Stepan Bandera, the notorious Nazi collaborator during the second world war; let us also forget the present context there: a war brought on by NATO’s insistence on extending itself eastwards…

A Good deal of analysis of the recent political upheaval in Bangladesh has focussed on the high-handedness and authoritarianism of Sheikh Hasina’s government; it has either missed altogether, or generally underplayed, the change that has occurred in the economic situation in that country. A country that was being hailed as an economic “miracle” just a few months ago is now mired in an economic crisis that has suddenly worsened the living conditions of vast numbers of people. It is this worsening which underlay the remarkable rise in the unpopularity of the Sheikh Hasina government. The government was held responsible for…

The French economist J B Say had believed that there could never be a problem of aggregate demand in any economy, that whatever was produced was ipso facto demanded. There could of course be too many safety-pins and too few blades, but other than such micro mismatches, there could never be too little demand for the aggregate output as a whole. This assertion which is called “Say’s Law” in economics is obviously an absurdity, because if it were true then there could never be an over-production crisis. Marx had pilloried Say’s Law, and in the 1930s J M Keynes and…

There is massive unemployment in the country that especially afflicts the youth; there is a huge and persistent inflation in food prices; there is acute and unprecedented rural distress; there is a crisis in the petty production sector; and income and wealth inequality has reached levels where the whole world is talking about it. One would have thought that a budget presented in the midst of all this would have shown some urgency, some boldness for tackling these issues. But no, not the 2024-25 budget presented by the NDA government to parliament on July 23. Neither in overall State spending…

In his opus The Wealth of Nations published in 1776 Adam Smith drew a distinction between the progressive state, the stationary state and the declining state. The progressive state was one where capital accumulation would be occurring at a rate faster than the growth of population, because of which wages would be high and population growing; in a declining state by contrast the opposite happened, while in a stationary state the capital stock and the population, and hence the labour force, was constant and so were the wages, but at a level lower than in the progressive state. Accordingly he…

The coming to power of governments led by fascists is either a reality or a threat today over large parts of the world. In Europe at present there are several countries where fascists are leading governments; France was on the verge of being added to this list, in which case it would have been the second major European power, after Italy, to have a fascist government. Had this happened, it would have been an event of historic significance, for France would then have had a fascist government for the first time after the Vichy government under Marshall Petain that had…