Abhijit Banerjee — who won the Nobel Economics Prize — is basically grounded in Indian economic policies and research, and also exclusively in the fields of microfinance and financial inclusion. The Indian American Economist who jointly won the Nobel Economics Prize along with his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer told on Monday that the Indian economy is “doing very badly” even though the government is aware of the fact that it is an issue.
Economist Abhijit Banerjee is also one of the advisors to Congress for thier NYAY scheme. The trio won the prize for experimental approach to eliminating global poverty. Abhijit had condemned the India’s currency note swap programme, demonetization. He was of the view that the pain was far more than it was formerly expected.
“First, there was the potential cost of a massive liquidity crunch, in which the volume or number of economic transactions reduces due to insufficient cash holdings. The brunt of this cost was borne by the informal sector, where 85% or more of the Indian labour force is employed, as transactions here have been traditionally carried out in cash.” Abhijit said in a paper co-authored with Harvard University’s Namrata Kala.
The economist also expressed his opinion that “when the economy is going into a “tailspin”, is the time when “you don’t worry so much about monetary stability and you worry a little bit more about demand. I think demand is a huge problem right now in economy.”
On work front, Banerjee works at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He got his Ph.D . from Harvard University. His wife Esther and he are professors of Economics at MIT while other recipient Michael Kremer is a Harvard University Professor in Economics as well.