Tag: India

Dissecting Capitalism Season I: A Recap

By Shyam Soundararajan | Dissecting Capitalism is a recurring webinar series in the South Asia Working Group that aims to organize a webinar series on the dominant ideology/economic system – capitalism. It aims to explore the tenets of capitalism over the fabric of time and examine its influence on the economy and social classes.

Over the course of 8 webinar sessions in November and December 2021, this project has brought together scholars from various fields of academia such as economics, philosophy, social policy, and law to dissect capitalism through their unique theoretical and empirical lenses. This webinar series was organized by Sattwick Dey Biswas, Aneesha Chitgupi, and Shyam Soundararajan. 

Before YSI South Asia hosts Season II of Dissecting Capitalism: Its past, present and future, here is a snapshot of the topics covered under Season I

Illustration by Aneesha Chitgupi

1. Globalization as a Threat to Democracy

The introductory session of the Webinar Series featured Professor Daniel W. Bromley, a Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This session was centered on globalization, international trade and democracy and was based on the book, “Possessive Individualism: A Crisis of Capitalism”. 

Through this session, Professor Bromley was able to provide an interactive lecture on why globalization is a threat to democratic coherence. Through this lecture, Professor Bromley was able to unveil and demonstrate the hidden reality that globalization weakens the ability of national governments to confront economic crises. 

Overall, this session displayed the problems that capitalism has imposed upon national governments, namely the inability to confront economic problems due to the issue of losing “global competitiveness”. View here

2. Multidimensional Poverty around the world: Unmasking Disparities

This session featured Dr. Sabina Alkire, the Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford. This session was centered around the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures poverty using a variety of factors. 

Through this webinar, Dr. Alkire was able to explain more about the MPI by explaining its methodology. After this, Dr. Alkire presented the findings of the October 2021 global MPI report. In addition to this, Dr. Alkire discussed and dissected various disparities across ethnic groups and populations. 

Overall, this webinar presented the impact of capitalism and its various endemic traits on poverty around the world. By discussing the MPI, Dr. Alkire was able to demonstrate how capitalism actively contributes to major poverty trends around the world. View here

3. Compressed Capitalism and Late Development in India

This session featured Professor Dr. Anthony P. D’Costa, an Eminent Scholar in Global Studies and Professor of Economics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. This session was centered around the changes faced by the Indian economy and the population following the 1991 economic reforms. 

Through this session, Professor D’Costa presented an alternative approach to understanding the development dynamic of India. Through the use of capitalist dynamics in developing countries and compressed capitalism, Professor D’Costa showed that wealth inequality present in India is an inherent trait of late capitalist societies.

Overall, this session explained how some of the defining flaws of a capitalist society in a developing country are not an anomaly but rather a key tenet of a late capitalist society. The findings discussed in this session led to a broader understanding of some key tenets of capitalism. View here.

4. Designing a Pro-Market Social Protection System: A Literature Review

This session featured Professor Dr. Einar Øverbye, a Professor in International Social Welfare and Health Policy at Oslo Metropolitan University. This session was centered around the common argument that the welfare state is detrimental to the economy as it disincentivizes work. 

Through this session, Professor Øverbye was able to explain and deconstruct the arguments surrounding the idea of welfare states disincentivizing work and reducing efficiency. By deconstructing the disincentive argument, Professor Øverbye was able to put forward his argument in support of designing a pro-market social protection system. Moreover, Professor Øverbye was able to demonstrate the importance of good design in a social system, thus unraveling the challenge surrounding the construction of a pro-market social protection system. 

Overall, this session explained how good design in social structures can overcome some fundamental flaws associated with a system. This session also covered the role of a welfare state in a capitalist society and was able to discuss the contribution of key tenets of capitalism to a pro-market social protection system.  View here.

5. The Law is an Anagram of Wealth

This session featured Professor Dr. Benjamin Davy, a visiting professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Johannesburg, and the School of Architecture and Spatial Planning, TU Wien University. Based on the book, “Land Policy”, this session addressed the relationship between land uses, land value, and land law.

Professor Davy was able to explain and demonstrate how the concept of material wealth depends heavily on the legal system present in a country. By using land laws and values, Professor Davy was able to explain how the economic structure of a society is affected by the law, thus leading back to the title of the session

Overall, this session showed attendees how material wealth, a key component of capitalism, depends on the legal system of a country. This inter-disciplinary session was also able to display the link between two seemingly unrelated fields of the social sciences, namely economics and law. View here.

6. John Stuart Mill’s Imperialism, Protestant Work Ethic, & Global South

This session featured Professor Dr. Elizabeth Anderson, the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This session was co-organized with Diana Soeiro, an organizer at the Philosophy of Economics Working Group. This session was based on the core ideas of Professor Anderson’s upcoming book, which is focused on the history of the Protestant work ethic through the history of economics. 

Through this session, Professor Anderson was able to show how John Stuart Mill’s economic theories on workers and his liberal ideas were contradictory to his stance on Imperialism. Professor Anderson was able to trace Mill’s contradictions to tensions innate to the Protestant work ethic. By doing this, Professor Anderson was able to transition to a more global discussion of the Protestant work ethic, which would be able to address the challenges faced by workers in the Global South in today’s economy.

Overall, this session presented yet another interdisciplinary focus on capitalism through philosophy and work ethic. By linking Mill’s contrarian positions to tensions in the Protestant work ethic and by globalizing the topic to factor in worker challenges in the Global South, Professor Anderson was able to provide some key insights on the often-ignored role of work ethic and philosophy in capitalism and globalization. View here.

7. Why Poverty is More Than a Lack of Income: Thoughts from China

This session featured Professor Dr. Robert Walker MBE, Professor at the Institute of Social Management/School of Sociology, Beijing Normal University under China’s ‘High-Level Foreign Talents’ program. This session was centred around the contemporary understanding of poverty beyond income and the case of China, which attempted to eradicate poverty in the 2010s. 

Through this session, Professor Walker was able to highlight the disparity between policy and political reality when it comes to the concept of poverty.

By including the case of China, which eliminated absolute poverty to discover the presence of relative poverty, Professor Walker was able to shift the argument of poverty beyond the idea of low income and was able to provide psychological insights on poverty. 

Overall, this session presented the need to rethink the mainstream understanding of poverty. Discussions surrounding China’s attempts to eradicate poverty presented an undocumented side of China affected by the country’s shift towards a semi-capitalist society. This session also provided an interdisciplinary outlook on poverty in China, which allowed attendees from the South Asia Working Group to be cognizant of poverty conditions in other Asian regions.  View here

8. Beyond False Dilemmas in Economic Policy

The final session of the first season featured Dr. Sanjay G. Reddy, Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. This session was centred around the discussion of false dilemmas in economic policy.

Through this session, Dr. Reddy was able to present his economic argument for dissolving and dismissing false dilemmas rather than resolving them. By using the false dilemmas of “for or against growth” and “domestic markets or globalization”, Dr. Reddy proved the logical fallacy in such dilemmas and presented alternative questions that were worth pursuing.

Overall, this session provided closure for the first season of “Dissecting Capitalism” by discussing false dilemma, a prominent element found in the discourse and dialogue surrounding capitalism and the need to rethink it. By discussing the “for or against growth” dilemma, Dr. Reddy was able to discuss a core argument presented by people opposing the need to rethink capitalism. Ultimately, this session allowed the attendees to dissect capitalism through the notion of false dilemmas present in today’s economic world. View here

Over the course of 8 webinar series held across 2 months, the South Asia Working Group was able to embark on a journey of exploration, learning and profound thinking. Moreover, the attendees were able to actively discuss core ideas of capitalism and dissect capitalist structures and norms, which enhanced discussion within the working group. 

While this season did cover mainstream ideas of capitalism and other economic factors that are affected by capitalism, it did not cover the link between capitalism and heterodox fields such as climate economics and agricultural economics. This is something that Season II aims to cover. With a wide range of topics from economic thought to climate change to legal theory, Season II aims to build upon the foundations of the first season and further continue to explore the tenets of capitalism.

Season II will feature Jayati Ghosh, Barbara Harris-White, Shailaja Fennell, Katharina Pistor, and K V Subramanian. Join us live!

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The YSI South Asia Working Group provides a platform for young scholars from South Asia -or those interested in the region- to select an issue they wish to work on, collaborate and discuss for better conceptualization of the problem and, debate, critique and improve upon solutions. We also invite scholars to suggest the most pressing problems and challenges to better guide the path for this working group. Join us!

About the organizers:

Sattwick Dey Biswas is an affiliated Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Policy, Bangalore, India. In 2019, he has earned Doctor rerum politicarum at the School of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund University, Germany. He has published his doctoral thesis as a book titled, “Land acquisition and compensation in India: Mysteries of valuation” (2020) with Palgrave Macmillan. He is interested in the areas of Land Policy, Social Policy, and Political Economy. 

Shyam Soundararajan is a high school student from Dubai, UAE. His research interests include economic development, poverty and wealth inequality. He has published articles in the Harvard International Review and has contributed vastly to his school’s social science curriculum. Shyam aspires to major in Mathematical Economics with a minor in South Asian Studies.

Aneesha Chitgupi is a research fellow at the XKDR-Forum -Chennai Mathematical Institute. She received her PhD in 2020 from Institute for Social and Economic Change affiliated to University of Mysore. Her thesis analysed the economic determinants of India’s external stabilisation under the balance of payments framework.  Her current research interests are public finance, government debt and liabilities management.

Women’s Work in South Asia: trends and challenges

Although gender equality in employment is among the Sustainable Development Goals for South Asia, progress is hard to observe. Determined to explore why female employment levels remain low and stagnant, Varsha Gupta and Arun Balachandran of YSI’s South Asia Working Group organized a webinar series. Featuring eminent speakers such as Prof. Jayati Ghosh, Prof. Sonalde Desai, Prof. Jeemol Unni, Prof. Ashwini Deshpande, Dr. Dipa Sinha and Dr. Ramani Gunatilaka, the resulting conversations shed much-needed light on the topic.

Illustration by Aneesha Chitgupi, Coordinator of the South Asia Working Group

Employment is a subset of work

The series began on May Day, with an inaugural session by Professor Jayati Ghosh. Highlighting the low female employment figures in India, she explained the difference between employment and work, the former being a subset of the latter. A major proportion of women are involved in work, though it is not paid and hence does not get counted as employment. The 2019 Time Use Survey in India reaffirms that women in India spend 2.5 times more time than men in unpaid activities. The gender wage gap exists and is high in private casual work. The Covid-19 pandemic has made things worse, furthering the case for gender-sensitive economic policies. View here

The impact of COVID-19

The second talk by Prof. Sonalde Desai focussed on employment trends during the Covid-19 pandemic. She presented the latest research with the use of Delhi Metropolitan Area survey (March 2019-20). The decline in employment occurred majorly in wage employment. With the use of econometric techniques, the research finds that in absolute terms, job loss for men was severe in the first wave of Covid-19, while the second surge hit women harder in the Delhi NCR region, India. The closure of schools and the consequent child rearing duties was one of the reasons that women’s wage work fell. Highly educated women were more affected than men. Rural areas absorbed the impact of the pandemic better than urban areas. The gender difference in impact was found to be highly dependent on the sector of employment and region. View here.

Informal workers bear the brunt

Jeemol Unni’s session concentrated on the impact of the Covid crisis on women and domestic violence among members of the informal workforce. Globally, pandemics harshly affect women more, due to the sectors and the kind of work women are involved in. The majority of the women form the bottom of the labor hierarchy. With the use of CMIE and NSS data, it is seen that the second wave of Covid-19 and lockdown affected women’s employment more vis-à-vis men. Discouraged worker effect is also visible among women.  View here.

Prof. Ashwini Deshpande’s talk focussed on the gendered patterns in employment in India during first wave of the pandemic. The world over, the subsequent economic recession led to more unemployment among women than men, a pattern different from previous recessions. This is visible in India as well, in the 2020 CMIE data. The already gendered labor market in India, with fewer women employed, worsened further for females. Though the absolute figures for job loss are higher for men, the impact has been higher on women due to the pre-existing gaps. There has been exacerbating of women’s position in the domestic division of labor during August-December 2020. View here.

The potential of public employment

The penultimate session was featured Dr. Dipa Sinha highlighting the relevance of public employment in generating opportunities for female labor force in India. Nations with higher female LFPR are the ones which also have higher proportion of women in the public sector. In India, the NSS data shows that government is a significant employer for women. There is also sectoral concentration of women in health and education, where they are engaged as contractual or honorary workers (ASHA’s, Anganwadi Workers). Creating regular permanent positions in these sectors could encourage female employment. View here.

Education is not enough

Various facets of female employment in Sri Lanka were brought in by Dr. Ramani Gunatilaka from International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo. While Srilankan women are better educated than their counterparts in other South Asian countries, they still remain disadvantaged in the labour market. As seen from a study led by Dr. Ramani on women’s activity preferences and time use, unpaid care and household work in Srilanka are mediated by social norms, and unequal division of unpaid work makes it difficult for women to take up paid work. View here.

Altogether, the webinars now form a virtual knowledge base on YSI’s YouTube Channel, making the insights available to young scholars all over the world.

About the organizers:

Arun Balachandran has a PhD in Economics from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, in collaboration with the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. He is currently a Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, and serves as Coordinator of the YSI South Asia Working Group.

Varsha Gupta is a PhD student in Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She using NSS data to assess issues of labor and gender, and serves as organizer for the YSI South Asia Working Group.

The YSI South Asia Working Group provides a platform for young scholars from South Asia -or those interested in the region- to select an issue they wish to work on, collaborate and discuss for better conceptualization of the problem and, debate, critique and improve upon solutions. We also invite scholars to suggest the most pressing problems and challenges to better guide the path for this working group. Join us!

Not such a Great Equalizer after all

Because it has no regard for borders, the coronavirus has been referred to as the Great Equalizer. But its impact is not equal by any stretch of the imagination. While China, Europe, and Northern America may recover relatively fast, emerging market economies are less resilient. The combined health, economic, and financial tolls they now endure may cause them to face the greatest recession in decades.

By Jack Gao | When COVID-19 hit, China’s strong state and centralized public administration allowed it to suppress the domestic spread. In Europe, welfare systems and appropriate policy responses made sure workers have less to worry about when economies reopen. The United States (despite Trump’s handling leaving much to be desired) enjoys a unique status of its own. The American economy and “exorbitant privilege” of the US dollar mean that policy responses can be put forth in short order, and with relatively few negative repercussions. For most emerging market economies, however, none of this can be taken for granted. The coronavirus is shaping up to be the “perfect storm” that many feared. It could sink the developing world into a deep economic recession.

No Doctors and No Food

Let’s start with public health. While the increase of new deaths in the epicenters—US, UK, Italy, Spain—appears to be slowing, the virus rages on in major developing nations. Russia, India, Mexico, and Brazil continue to report well above a thousand new daily deaths, and many of them are still on an upward trajectory. In India, a brief relaxation of the lockdown was met with a jump in deaths, underscoring that the fight to contain the virus will be an uphill battle.

Although health systems are being tested everywhere, the ones in developing countries were already under strain before COVID-19 reared its head. For example, the average number of health workers per 1000 people in OCED countries is 12.3. In the African region, this ratio is only 1.4.

As if the health crisis is not crushing enough, the United Nations warns of a “hunger pandemic” as an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation this year, with the vast majority of them in developing countries. The coronavirus may cross borders easily, but the suffering it causes is not equal across countries.

Locked Down and Out of Work

If the human toll of the pandemic is appalling, the economic damages to countries are unprecedented as well, as countries implement lockdown and “social distancing” to combat the virus. In the latest World Economic Outlook growth projections by the IMF, emerging market economies as a whole are expected to contract 1% this year, for the first time since the Great Depression. Literally all developing countries may be in economic decline as a result of COVID-19, with India and China eking out paltry growth. Still, these headline numbers mask the true extent of economic hardship.

Take working from home, for example. Economists have documented a clear relationship between the share of jobs that can be done at home and the national income level. In a developed country like the United States, some 37 percent of jobs can be performed at home—education, finance and IT being at the top of the scale. In some developing economies, less than 10 percent of jobs can be done remotely.

On top of all this, global remittances are collapsing. The amount of money transferred to migrants’ home countries may fall by 20 percent as workers see dwindling employment. This is terrible news for countries like Lesotho, where remittances are as much as 16% of GDP.

Where’d the money go?

The global financial system exacerbates these struggles with its core and periphery topology. During good times, foreign capital flows into emerging markets, looking for higher yields. But in bad times, when that capital is needed most, it swiftly disappears. This dynamic is now on full display. As investors started to realize the true scale of the pandemic and major central banks initiated new rounds of monetary easing, emerging economies saw capital flight as investors rushed to safer assets. An estimated 100 billion portfolio dollars fled emerging markets in the first quarter alone.

In the face of such severe dollar shortages and liquidity crunch in developing countries, the Federal Reserve had to expand central bank liquidity swaps and launch a new lending facility to come to the rescue. The impact of such international measures is still an open question. But with currency depreciation, higher borrowing costs, declining official reserves, and falling commodity prices, it appears that the financial stress emerging economies are under may be difficult to reverse.

The Triple Whammy

This way, developing countries face a health-blow, and economic-blow, and a financial-blow, all at once. An emerging market economy faced with just one of those would have resulted in a crisis. But amid COVID-19, all emerging economies were are confronted with all three crises at the same time. The damage done by this “triple whammy” could plague the developing world for years to come.

Jack Gao is a Program Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is interested in international economics and finance, energy policy, economic development, and the Chinese economy.  He previously worked in financial product and data departments in Bloomberg Singapore, and reported on Asian financial markets in Bloomberg News from Shanghai. Jack holds a MPA in International Development from Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.S. in Economics from Singapore Management University. He has published articles on China Policy Review and Harvard Kennedy School Review.