The Legacy of Ashok Mitra

Ashok Mitra, the renowned Indian economist, passed away on 1 May 2018. Mitra was a keen analyst of the relationship between economics and politics, which he understood as being inextricably enmeshed, with the latter having a degree of relative autonomy. It followed, for Mitra, that class struggle ‘in society at large’ underlay ‘every aspect’ of economic life, including the determination of economic variables. He focused his analytical sights on distributional dynamics, specifically on the relative shares of the different classes in national income and the role of the State. He took issue with, and went beyond, Kalecki’s theory of ‘degree of monopoly’, which Mitra did not take as a given but as determined by factors that included the real wage rate. He also advanced, beyond the main approaches, to the issue of the terms of trade, including that of Prebisch, by illuminating the class differentiation within the sectors, especially agriculture, and the political clout of the rural rich. Mitra was also passionate for economic decentralization, at a time when the Third World was in a special, early post-war and post-colonial conjuncture, which bestowed a higher degree of manoeuver for state intervention and policymaking. Mitra will be remembered as a theorist of the ‘dirigiste’ phase of Third World development