Professor Subrata Ghatak (1939‐2012)

June 19, 2017 | Autor: Sushanta Mallick | Categoria: Human Geography, Development, Applied Economics, Public Administration and Policy
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Journal of International Development J. Int. Dev. 25, 757–759 (2013) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.2925

OBITUARY PROFESSOR SUBRATA GHATAK (1939-2012)

I could not believe when I heard in early January 2012 that Subrata was no more. I had had very close contact with Subrata since 2006, although I first met him in 1997 during an ESRC study group workshop in development economics at the University of Birmingham. At that time, I was doing my PhD at the University of Warwick. Subrata was a dedicated academician and prolific author. Along with his wife—Anita Ghatak, who was also a professor in economics before she sadly passed away in 2005—Subrata wrote a number of articles through which I knew of him when I started doing research in the early 1990s in India. I was indeed very excited to meet him for the first time in 1997 in the UK. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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The last time I spoke to Subrata on the phone was on 27 December 2011. At the time, he was absolutely fine and looking forward to his travel to India on 4 January 2012. He was scheduled to give a few lectures in India in early January 2012 and was really excited about his planned tour in the north-western parts of India in late January. We had agreed that we would meet after his return from India in February and work on a research paper. Sadly, before he could even travel, he apparently suffered a fatal heart attack at his home. It is extremely sad that his death was so unexpected and untimely. Subrata was a kind and helpful person with a great sense of humour. He was very helpful to many people, including the EEFS (www.eefs-eu.org), a society that he formed along with a few founding members and helped promote over the years since 2001. I was first introduced to this Society by Subrata in 2007, and since then, I have been on its executive committee. Last year, at the annual EEFS meeting in June 2012, Subrata was greatly missed, and he will be missed at future EEFS meetings. Subrata made several key contributions to the Development Economics literature, bringing a much-needed rigour to different issues in this field. Subrata was a wonderful man with so much interest in economics that even during his retirement, he was so actively involved in writing papers, going to conferences and attending every session and making comments on each paper in a conference. To mention a few of his writings, Subrata made a key contribution to the literature on credit markets in developing countries by providing a link between unorganised and organised credit markets in India and showing how interest rates were determined in such markets (see Ghatak, 1975a). Establishing and strengthening this link between formal and informal institutions has become a key policy issue in development finance (the so-called microfinance revolution) in recent decades. Therefore, his early contribution to this area of research was indeed noteworthy, as it highlighted the existence of credit market imperfections, which became key constraints for lack of development in low-income countries. Also, in the early 1970s, around the time of the green revolution in India, Subrata critically examined the concept of marketed surplus in Indian agriculture and showed that generating any excess of agricultural production over consumption would be conditional upon the relative dominance of income and substitution effects (see Ghatak, 1975b). More recently, Subrata worked on a number of issues in development economics, namely international and inter-sectoral migration, monetary policy in transition economies, fiscal policy and so on. Subrata (along with his wife Anita) jointly published a paper on the possibility of significant crowding-out effects of government consumption on private consumption (Ghatak and Ghatak, 1996)—a very realistic scenario where government consumption still remains an important component in most low-income countries. Subrata published a paper in this journal (co-authored with Paul Levine: Ghatak and Levine, 1994) where he examined in a macroeconomic model the cost of adjustment required by national solvency, following India’s balance of payments crisis in 1991. Although the model was on India, the work is very much relevant in the context of the recent debt crisis in Euro area countries. Subrata will always be remembered for his contribution to economics in developing and transition economies. Development Macroeconomics became a major theme in his later work helping to bring development economics together with mainstream macroeconomics - a theme on which he co-edited (along with Paul Levine) a volume in memory of his wife (Ghatak and Levine, 2009). For this volume, Subrata invited me to contribute a paper on linking macroeconomic policies with poverty reduction which in fact led me to do further work on this Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

J. Int. Dev. 25, 757–759 (2013) DOI: 10.1002/jid

Obituary 759 topic. He wrote over 100 journal articles and two major textbooks. Subrata received his PhD from SOAS, University of London, and his prior education was in India at the University of Calcutta. Subsequently, he taught Economics at the University of Leicester, UK, for many years until he moved to Kingston University as a professor in 1997 from where he took his full retirement in 2008. Subrata is survived by his daughter Churni Jennings. Some of Subrata’s outside interests included his love of cricket, cooking, music and films, and his warm hospitality. For further anecdotes and reflections, see the following web link put together by Paul Herrington at Leicester: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/economics/news/tributeto-professor-subrata-ghatak REFERENCES Ghatak S. 1975a. Rural interest rates in the Indian economy, Journal of Development Studies, 11(3): 191–201. Ghatak S. 1975b. Marketed Surplus in Indian Agriculture: Theory and Practice, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 37(2): 143–53. Ghatak A, Ghatak S. 1996. Budgetary deficits and Ricardian equivalence: The case of India, 1950–1986, Journal of Public Economics, 60(2): 267–282. Ghatak S, Levine P. 1994. The adjustment towards national solvency in developing countries: An application to India. Journal of International Development, 6(4): 399–414. Ghatak S, Levine P. (ed.) (2009). Development Macroeconomics: Essays in Memory of Anita Ghatak. Routledge: London.

SUSHANTA MALLICK Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

J. Int. Dev. 25, 757–759 (2013) DOI: 10.1002/jid

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