Jayati Ghosh

Why organisations work with Jayati Ghosh

• Sits on the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism and the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, so her read on global financial and health governance is drawn from inside the rooms where it is being rewritten.
• Co-chairs ICRICT, the independent commission pressing for reform of international corporate taxation, which gives her first-hand authority on the OECD-led tax overhaul that is reshaping how multinationals plan their effective rate.
• Reads emerging-market risk from a development-economist vantage point, not a Wall Street one, which is what buyers booking her tend to want: a sharper picture of sovereign debt, currency stress, and the political economy of the Global South.
• Thirty-five years at Jawaharlal Nehru University and now at UMass Amherst, author or editor of nineteen books, and winner of the ILO Decent Work Research Prize and the Galbraith Award: credentials that translate into credibility with serious audiences.
• Writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, so her current thinking is publicly available and buyers can hear the argument before booking the room.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, since January 2021.
• Member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism (2022).
• Member, WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, chaired by Mariana Mazzucato.
• Co-chair, Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT).
• ILO Decent Work Research Prize (2011); John Kenneth Galbraith Award, AAEA (2023).
• Author or editor of nineteen books, including Women Workers in the Informal Economy and The Making of a Catastrophe: Covid-19 and the Indian Economy; monthly columnist for Project Syndicate.

Biography

The rules governing cross-border capital, corporate tax, and public health spending are being rewritten at the same time. Boards that track any one of these in isolation tend to miss how they interact. Ghosh works across all three.

She is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a post she took up in 2021 after nearly 35 years teaching at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Her research has long focused on globalisation, employment in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and the gendered structure of informal labour. Nineteen books and roughly two hundred scholarly articles sit behind that work.

The institutional footprint is what sets her apart from other macro voices. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres named her in 2022 to the 12-person High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, the body tasked with proposing reforms to global governance ahead of the Summit of the Future. She sits on the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, chaired by Mariana Mazzucato, and co-chairs ICRICT, which has driven much of the civil-society case for a global minimum corporate tax.

Outside academic journals she writes a monthly Project Syndicate column read by finance ministers and central bankers, and for nearly three decades ran a fortnightly column at Frontline. The ILO awarded her its Decent Work Research Prize in 2011; the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association gave her its Galbraith Award in 2023 for contributions to economics and to humanity.

Key speaking topics

• Global financial architecture and reform
• International corporate tax and ICRICT’s agenda
• Inequality, labour, and the informal economy
• Development and growth in India and the Global South
• Economics of health and public goods
• Sovereign debt and emerging-market risk
• Gender and the economics of care

Ideal for

• Boards and investment committees sizing emerging-market and sovereign-debt exposure.
• CFOs and tax leaders tracking the OECD minimum tax and the next wave of multinational tax reform.
• Leadership teams in global health, pharma, and development finance who need a public-goods frame for their strategy.
• Conferences on globalisation, inequality, and the future of multilateralism where a policy-insider voice is needed.

Audience outcomes

• A clear read on how the UN, WHO and OECD reform agendas translate into corporate risk over the next three to five years.
• A defensible position on international tax reform and what it means for transfer pricing, effective rates and reputational exposure.
• A sharper picture of sovereign debt and currency stress in the Global South, drawn from development-economics evidence rather than market commentary.
• An argument for why care, informal labour, and gender sit inside the macro picture, not alongside it.