Jayati Ghosh

NEW DELHI – Among the many inequalities revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most striking is the dramatic divergence in governments’ fiscal responses. Economic activity has collapsed worldwide as a result of lockdown measures to contain the coronavirus. But while some developed countries have been able to deploy fiscal stimulus on an unprecedented scale, most have not

NEW DELHI – The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust the entire world – rich and poor – into uncharted territory, prompting extraordinary policy responses almost everywhere. The looming economic fallout will be more severe than that of the Great Depression, the 2008 global financial crisis, and perhaps even the two world wars. After all, none of these previous epochal crises involved a simultaneous global collapse of both demand and supply, with little certainty of how long the sudden stop would persist

NEW DELHI – Pandemics like COVID-19, alarming and destructive as they are, can serve a useful purpose if they remind everyone of the critical importance of public health

NEW DELHI – Around the world, governments are succumbing to the allure of biometric identification systems. To some extent, this may be inevitable, given the burden of demands and expectations placed on modern states. But no one should underestimate the risks these technologies pose

NEW DELHI – On January 5, masked men and women stormed the New Delhi campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where I am a professor, and attacked the students and faculty they found there with sticks, iron rods, and scythes. The university administration, security guards, and local police not only failed to protect the innocent victims of this rampage, which included vandalism and trespassing, in addition to the violence; they watched and were complicit in the assault. This is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India

NEW DELHI – Injustice, discrimination, and violence are hardly unheard of in India. But today, they are being normalized, enabled, and even encouraged by the state, which is promoting an aggressive form of Hindu nationalism that looks increasingly like mob rule. India’s diversity and complex civilizational legacy are now under assault, and it is shaking the very foundations of Indian democracy

NEW DELHI – The dangers of environmental pollution receive a lot of attention nowadays, particularly in the developing world, and with good reason. Air quality indices are dismal and worsening in many places, with India, in particular, facing an acute public-health emergency. But as serious as the pollution problem is, it must not be allowed to obscure another incipient environmental catastrophe, and potential source of future conflict: lack of access to clean water

NEW DELHI – In the natural world, humans stand out for the complexity of the tools, technologies, and institutions that we have developed. According to the anthropologist Joseph Henrich, we owe this success to our ability to accumulate, share, and adapt cultural information across generations. But just as interconnection causes our “collective brains” to expand over time, isolation can cause them to shrink. Economists should take note