Articles

  • The Kazan Summit of BRICS 11th November, 2024 |Prabhat PatnaikThe Kazan summit of the BRICS countries was a historic one for several reasons: first, it created a new category called “partner nations” as a step towards full membership, and accepted 13 such new “partner” countries, among whom were Cuba and Bolivia. Second, it came out against unilateral economic sanctions that the US-led imperialist powers ...
  • Economics Nobel: No surprises 28th October, 2024 |C. P. ChandrasekharThe Sveriges Riksbank Prize, the Nobel for “Economic Sciences”, has always been controversial. This is true of the 2024 award to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson as well. Typically, the economics Nobel is awarded to mainstream economists for work that directly or indirectly privileges the market in capitalist economies and makes a case ...
  • The Dialectics of Wealth and Poverty 28th October, 2024 |Prabhat PatnaikThis year’s Nobel Prize in economics (the Riksbank Prize to be more precise) has been awarded to three US-based economists for their research into what promotes or hinders the growth of wealth among nations; and they assign a crucial role to institutions, arguing that western institutions like electoral democracy are conducive to growth. Where colonialism ...

Features

  • The Geopolitics of the Natural Gas Trade 13th November, 2024 |Jayati GhoshThere’s no doubt that the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States sets the stage for further expansion of fossil fuel production in the US, especially of natural gas, of which the US has emerged as the world’s largest producer and exporter. The Ukraine War was a significant catalyst for ...
  • The Angst over China’s Slowdown 29th October, 2024 |C. P. ChandrasekharFor some time now, global economic news reporting has been dominated by the growth slowdown in China. The tone of that reporting is conflicted. On the one hand, there is a barely suppressed sense of satisfaction or “schadenfreude” (pleasure derived from another’s misfortune). The myth of a ‘rising China’ capable of sustaining high growth for ...
  • Falling Shares of Labour Income 15th October, 2024 |Jayati GhoshThe latest World Employment and Social Outlook Report (update for September 2024) from the International Labour Organisation highlights some disturbing trends. Importantly, it identifies a significant decline and then stagnation in the share of labour income in GDP, for the world as a whole, in the past few years. This comes as part of a persistent trend ...

Announcements

  • Young Scholars Conference Political Economy of Contemporary South Asia 14th June, 2023 |Macroscan TeamOur key theme is the political economy of contemporary South Asia. At the core of these transformations are the fraught and so-called “truncated transition,” where South Asian societies are not making the transition from farm to factory, but the rise of informal economies, industrial clusters, in-between agrarian-urban and peri-urban spaces force us to rethink familiar ...
  • Remembering Abhijit Sen 11th September, 2022 |Macroscan Team
  • When Governments Fail: A pandemic and its aftermath 25th August, 2021 |Vikas Rawal August 2021 6.14 x 9.21 inches (xx+292) 312 pages Hardback ISBN: 978-81-947175-4-6 Rs 900 The Covid-19 pandemic has generated human suffering and economic devastation across the world – but these reflect not just the effects of the disease but the policy failures of governments. The pandemic has highlighted and accentuated the extent of inequalities between and within countries. These have been ...

Obitutary

  • Remembering Abhijit Sen 11th September, 2022 |Macroscan Team
  • Abhijit Sen carved out a Unique Space of his Own 3rd September, 2022 |Poornima Varma Abhijit Sen, eminent economist, passed away on August 29 at the age of 71. He retired as Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP), Jawaharlal Nehru University, in 2015. During his association with the university, which spanned a period of more than three decades, Prof. Sen made remarkable contributions to the rural and ...
  • For Abhijit Sen, Facts and Data were Religion and Ideology 1st September, 2022 |Himanshu My last meeting with Professor Abhijit Sen was just a week ago, before his untimely death due to a heart attack on August 29. We were trying to make sense of trends in the Indian economy, particularly in poverty, inequality and employment. We parted with the promise to meet soon to continue our discussion with more data ...

Video

  • Panel Discussion: Three Decades of Neo-liberal Reforms in India: Critique and resistance 5th September, 2021 |Macroscan Team Date: Sep 4, 2021 Time: 06:30 PM IST Speakers: Prabhat Patnaik, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University C. P. Chandrasekhar, Professor of Economics (retired), Jawaharlal Nehru University Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Moderated by Prof. Surajit Mazumdar, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
  • Do Formalisation Policies help Women Workers? 7th April, 2021 |Macroscan TeamWebinar sponsored by PERI and IDEAs Panel discussion on the new book “Informal Women Workers in the Global South” with Jayati Ghosh, Martha Chen, Diane Elson, Pasuk Phongpaichit, Dzodzi Tsikata, Hameda Deedat, and C. P. Chandrasekhar
  • Agrarian Change Seminar: ‘Protests against the New Farm Laws in India’ 31st January, 2021 |Vikas Rawal In the second half of 2020, while the country was struggling with COVID-19 pandemic and impacts of a crippling 10-week national lockdown, the Indian government enacted three national laws related to agriculture. These laws created a new national framework for contract farming, deregulated agricultural marketing to open the doors for greater corporate control, and reduced ...

Special Features

  • Budget 2023-24: Neither growth nor welfare friendly 8th February, 2023 |C. P. ChandrasekharIf we ignore the hype that accompanies and follows the presentation of the Centre’s annual budget, there are principally two strands in it that have attracted attention. The first is the claim of the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman that in a growth-accelerating intervention, the step-up in capital or investment expenditure during the second term of ...
  • Budget 2023-24: Ignoring the Economy’s Basic Problem 6th February, 2023 |Prabhat PatnaikThe most outstanding feature of the Indian economy today is the sluggish increase in real consumption expenditure. Between 2019-20 and 2022-23 for instance the per capita real consumption expenditure has grown by less than 5 per cent which is less than the rate of growth of the gross domestic product. Even the meagre recovery from ...
  • Tightening the Screws 3rd February, 2023 |Jayati GhoshWe all know that the Narendra Modi government has strong centralising tendencies — not just between the Centre and the state governments but even within Central ministries, with the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministry of home affairs being the loci of real power. We also know that with the closure of the Planning Commission ...