Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee – who won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize (along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer) – said on Monday that the Indian economy is now unstable. Speaking to a Bengali news channel, Banerjee said that “even five to seven years ago, there were concerns, but there was at least growth… but now the situation is such that I cannot be very confident about”.
Banerjee reiterated this in other interviews as well, including the press conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after winning the prize. He said that the Indian economy is “doing very badly”, even as the government is increasingly recognising that there is a problem. “The economy is doing very badly in my view,” he said at a press conference. Asked about the future of the Indian economy, Banerjee said, “That’s a statement not about what will work in future but about what’s going on now. That I am entitled to have an opinion about.”
Banerjee said that “between 2014-15 and 2017-18, that number [the National Sample Survey that comes every 1.5 years on average consumption in urban and rural India] has slightly gone down. And that’s the first time such a thing has happened in many many many many years so that’s a very glaring warning sign”.
Adding that there is a lot of dispute going on in India on which data is correct, he said that “even the government is increasingly recognising that there is a problem.”
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