World renowned economist, Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, delivered this year’s IDS Annual Lecture on ‘The complexities of success: Globalisation, inequality and economic insecurity in China and India’.
China and India
China and India, albeit to a lesser extent, are seen as the biggest beneficiaries of the recent phase of globalisation, with rising per capita incomes and declines in income poverty. Yet a closer look reveals a more complex and differentiated picture. Despite big differences between them and the much more impressive performance of China, both countries show rising inequalities, greater fragility and insecurity of material life for a significant section of the population. As well as environmental crises, insufficient employment generation and looming demographic challenges.
In both countries, the limits of the current growth strategy are becoming evident, with India’s development project in particular still very far from being completed. Growth trajectories that have increased and relied upon inequalities of different kinds breed the invisible discontents of globalisation. Giving voice to these groups could well create social and political pressures similar to those sweeping across advanced capitalist societies today.
About the Speaker
Jayati Ghosh is one of the world’s leading economists and Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has a wide range of research interests, including globalisation, international trade and finance, gender and development, and the implications of recent growth in China and India.
Her books include Demonetisation Decoded: A critique of India’s monetary experiment (with CP Chandrasekhar and Prabhat Patnaik, Routledge 2017), the Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development (co-edited with Erik Reinert and Rainer Kattel, Edward Elgar 2016) and the edited volume India and the International Economy, (Oxford University Press 2015), Industrialization of China and India: The impacts on the world economy, (co-edited with Nobuharu Yokokawa and Robert E. Rowthorn, Routledge 2013), and Never done and poorly paid: Women’s work in globalising India (Women Unlimited, New Delhi 2008).
Her research output has been recognised through several prizes in India and abroad. She was awarded the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2010 in Geneva, and also received the NordSud Prize for Social Sciences 2010 of the Fondazione Pescarabruzzo, Italy. She was the principal author of the West Bengal Human Development Report 2004 which received the 2005 UNDP Award for excellence in analysis.
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