Articles by Jayati Ghosh

The Rupee and Its Malcontents Exchange Rate Management in India Jayati Ghosh Abhijit Sen C P Chandrasekhar The sources of the current instability in the currency markets - portfolio capital inflows from foreign institutional investors, exporters withholding their foreign exchange earnings and reckless imports and import hunching by domestic firms are rendered the more potent because of the reduced ability of the government to intervene effectively, it having discarded many of the instruments it could earlier have used to determine the exchange rate of the rupee. Having tied its own hands so effectively, the government's external economic policy has become a prisoner of speculative forces rather than their master.

Life after Enron Jayati Ghosh Abhijit Sen C P Chandrasekhar The Enron agreement was only one of eight so-called fast track' agreements with multinational companies on terms, essentially dictated by the union ministry of power, which are ruinous for the concerned state governments and for power consumers. However, the danger of focusing only on these specific projects is that attention may be diverted from the more fundamental task of framing a new policy for the power sector. What are the dimensions of the crisis facing the power sector and how can it be resolved? Confusion on these basic issues has led to many reactions to the Enron fiasco which are erroneous and misleading.

Jayati Ghosh While the impact of short-term stabilisation measures are disquieting, they can still be reversed. The likely long- term effects of liberalisation measures which move towards greater market orientation are more disturbing, not only because they affect women's material conditions immediately but because they set in motion longer term tendencies in the economy, society and in ideology which are much more difficult to reverse.

If two years of 'shock therapy' constitute any evidence, there is no ground for optimism regarding the viability of the government's current strategy either from a growth or from a balance of payments point of view.

Illusions Jayati Ghosh The emergence of blocs in foreign investment, similar to those in world trade, is of particular interest to those developing countries, including India, which have made attracting foreign investment a major plank of recent policy initiatives.