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Global South will pay for Trump and Netanyahu’s war 7th March, 2026 |C. P. ChandrasekharAs February ended, a stunned world tracked with disbelief the unwarranted war on Iran declared by the US under President Donald Trump and Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Aimed at ensuring externally engineered regime change justified on grounds that do not stand up to even cursory scrutiny, the immediate fallout of the aggravated aggression violative of international ...
India’s Trade Deals: Giving more, Getting less 13th February, 2026 |C. P. ChandrasekharWithin a fortnight after announcing a trade deal with the EU, the Indian government announced its entry into a “framework agreement” on trade with the US—a precursor to an “interim agreement” and a subsequent full-fledged bilateral trade agreement. Both “trade deals” were concluded in a rush, having been in various stages of negotiation for years. In ...
Will Democracy Govern Capitalism – or be consumed by it? 7th February, 2026 |Jayati Ghosh and Joseph E. StiglitzFollowing aggressive lobbying by the Trump administration, more than 145 countries agreed to give big US multinationals a free pass under the global corporate minimum tax rules that were agreed in 2021. But if democracy is to prevail over oligarchy, policymakers must tax extreme wealth appropriately – and they must do it fast. Read the full ...

What’s Really Going on in the Indian Economy? 5th February, 2026 |C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati GhoshIt is probably only to be expected that the official account, in the Finance Ministry’s justreleased Economic Survey 2025-26, would be generally upbeat about the Indian economy and the current policy direction of the Modi government. We have also come to expect that data will be cherry-picked to provide the best and most optimistic outlook. ...
China’s Trade Relations Need Reform 21st January, 2026 |C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati GhoshEarly in January, preliminary estimates of China’s trade surplus (from the General Administration of Customs of China) placed it at $1.7 trillion in 2025, as compared with $993 million in 2024. The sharp 20 per cent rise in the trade surplus occurred because, while China’s aggregate exports rose by 5.2 per cent in dollar value, ...
Who Says Economic Growth Generates Employment? 9th January, 2026 |C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati GhoshThe idea that economic growth leads to more employment is at one level so obvious that it has become axiomatic among economists and policy makers. After all, higher production will require more inputs, and presumably labour is a crucial input for many, if not most, activities. Therefore, it is common to find that both policy ...

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, C. P. Chandrasekhar, and Jayati Ghosh 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Function of Neoliberal Budgets 5th August, 2025 |C. P. ChandrasekharWith the short-term, frenzied interest that accompanies annual budget presentations in India having ended, it is time to raise issues that were largely ignored in the debate. Prime among them is the question as to how much or how little new taxes were raised to finance the many pressing demands that face the government, from ...
Budget 2024-25: A Frightening Obduracy 29th July, 2024 |Prabhat PatnaikThere 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 ...
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 ...