Development in a Time of Financial Crisis: How Good is the Bad News? By Jayati Ghosh

Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University,

Abstract

For around a decade before the 2008 global crisis, developing countries were told that they never had it so good, benefiting from a combination of increased commodity prices and accelerated inflows of private cross-border capital. As it happened, this did not necessarily benefit many citizens of the developing world, as both employment and livelihoods of small producers and workers became more fragile. Since the crisis, evidence of synchronous movements in asset markets across the world as well as falling exports of even dynamic exporters have indicated the degree to which markets of North and South are linked. Even so, financial and trade openness are seen as either inevitable realities or desirable goals for developing countries, which then provide the contours for all other economic and development strategies.

However, it is possible to argue that this is not so, and that despite both greater global integration and major slowdown and/or recession in Northern countries, there is scope – maybe even enhanced scope – for a rethinking of development strategies along more egalitarian and sustainable lines. In this lecture, I will consider whether there are still policy spaces even for governments in small open countries to move towards different, more decent employment generating and redistributive policies that simultaneously create different patterns of production and consumption.

Further info:

kingdon@remove-this.iss.nl