PERI researcher Isabella Weber argues that state capitalism is experiencing a revival as a term to capture the current capitalist constellations, increasingly replacing neoliberalism. Unlike neoliberalism, the term state capitalism has a long history reaching back to the age of imperialism in the late 19th century, being used to describe developmentalist and neo-mercantilist projects in reaction to imperialism in the periphery. What is new is that, starting with China, deploying state capitalism as a means for catching up with the West is bearing fruit in ways that could undermine the predominance of Western economies.

The literature on agrarian change in India collapses women’s class relations into those of male household heads. Sirisha Naidu and Smriti Rao examine how the 2019 Indian Time Use survey could lend itself to better understand class relations by accommodating an expanded conception of work as including reproductive labor; accounting for the diversified livelihoods of rural Indians; and more accurately grasping caste and gender distinctions in differentiated labor processes with capital. Within this framework, Naidu and Rao explore methods for deepening feminist political economy analyses of agrarian change.

In The Making of a Catastrophe, PERI researcher Jayati Ghosh describes how the COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst health calamity in India for at least a century and, in particular, how the central government’s “very specific policy failures—acts of both commission and omission—were responsible for the widespread and pronounced decline in people’s livelihoods …and caused major setbacks to the development project of the country.” Ghosh documents how the central government “did next to nothing to ensure basic protection for the hundreds of millions of people who were denied income for several months.”