Jayati Ghosh

Jayati Ghosh (born 16 September 1955) is an Indian development economist.

She is the Chairperson of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her core areas of study include international economics, employment patterns in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and issues related to gender and development.

Jayati Ghosh was born on 16 September 1955.

Ghosh attended Delhi University for her undergraduate and got her M.A., M.Phil.

in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

She joined Cambridge University for her PhD after winning the Inlaks Scholarship.

Her 1984 doctoral thesis at Cambridge University was entitled The Non capitalist Land Rent: Theories and the Case of North India under the supervision of Dr. Terence J. Byres.

Ghosh has previously held positions at Tufts University and Cambridge University, lecturing meanwhile at academic institutions throughout India.

She is one of the founders of the Economic Research Foundation, New Delhi, a non-profit trust devoted to progressive economic research.

(Selections of her columns from the Macroscan, the Foundation's outlet, will be published as Tracking the Macroeconomy.) She is also the Executive Secretary of the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAS), a network of economists critical of the mainstream economic paradigm of neo-liberalism.

Ghosh was the principal author of the West Bengal Human Development Report which has received the United Nations Development Programme Prize for excellence in analysis.

In addition to her many scholarly articles, she writes regular columns on economics and current affairs for Frontline magazine, Business Line, the Bengali newspaper Ganashakti, Deccan Chronicle, and Asian Age.

She also writes a regular column for the fortnightly national magazine Frontline, focusing mainly on economic issues.

In Spring Term 2011, Ghosh served as the first Ragnar Nurkse Visiting professor in Development Economics at Tallinn University of Technology's Technology Governance graduate program.

In addition to her academic work, Ghosh has been serving on several advisory board.

In 2021, she was appointed to the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health For All, chaired by Mariana Mazzucato.

Since 2022, she has been a member of the Commission for Universal Health convened by Chatham House and co-chaired by Helen Clark and Jakaya Kikwete.

Also since 2022, she has been part of the joint World Bank/WHO Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB).

Ghosh has consistently maintained a pro-student stance.

Ghosh was conferred International Labour Organisation's Decent Work Research Prize along with Professor Eve Landau in February 2011.

Other awards include:

Ghosh is married to Abhijit Sen, an economist who was a member of the disbanded Planning Commission.

In February 2016, she accused the NDA government of shutting down student protests against the capital punishment sentence to Afzal Guru.

In a lecture enumerating the "anti-national policies of the NDA", she spoke about the importance of student protests and discussion, and the current government's aversion to the demand for transparency and accountability.

In October 2019, Ghosh expressed her belief that the relay of policymakers who were fixed to political dogmas that discouraged more public spending was dangerous to the economy and destabilizing to society.

In her co-authored book, Demonetisation Decoded: A critique of India’s monetary experiment, she criticizes the monetary decision taken by the Modi government as an ineffective and wasteful exercise.

Claiming that the government did not have data post December 2019, she declared Nirmala Sitharaman's pre-budget speech as ineffectual and inaccurate.

She also emphasized the lack of attention given to the need for creation of employment in the new budget, stating that there were cuts in almost every employment-intensive sector.

By withholding information that by constitutional law should be freely available to the public, she said, the Modi government was able to play caste politics.

In February 2020, Ghosh criticized the Modi-led government for misrepresenting data in the 2020 Budget which was presented a month earlier than usual.