Jayati Ghosh

Jayati Ghosh is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA, with a career spanning nearly five decades. She previously taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) for 35 years and held positions at Tufts University, the University of Cambridge, and Tallinn University of Technology.

Her research focuses on development economics, particularly the complexities of capitalist development, gender and the economy (e.g., unpaid labor and women’s participation in India), labor economics, and relational inequalities such as caste and gender. She critiques the over-reliance on GDP as a development metric and emphasizes the role of the state in equitable development.

Key examples of her work include analyzing afforestation policies in South Asia through a gender lens and advocating for pluralism in economic theory and pedagogy. She argues that mainstream economics has become technocratic and disconnected from societal realities, urging a return to critical, historically grounded approaches.