Joseph Stiglitz, 76, gently placed his walking stick beside the sofa and a stack of papers on the table as he settled in to savour some South Indian breakfast. He was in the city to deliver a lecture organised by a university.

It has been almost three decades since India liberalised and integrated with the global economy. It was the seventh largest economy in the world by gross domestic product in 2018. But this growth has slowed, and is expected to shrink further in 2019-20, according to multiple global institutions.

“The data that I have seen reinforces very strong concerns [about the economy],” Stiglitz told IndiaSpend in the course of an interview. “I do not know anybody who is not in the government who is not worried.” Governments tend to “suppress data when it is on shaky grounds”, he added.

While India has been able to benefit from globalisation, there is a view that is “not an uncommon view but an unpleasant one”, that in a regulated market like India foreign players “have a disadvantage because the insiders know how to play the game”.

Stiglitz won the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the US from 1993-95, during the Bill Clinton administration, and its chairperson from 1995-97. Between 1997 and 2000, he served as chief economist and senior vice-president of the World Bank.

Stiglitz has authored multiple books on economics including People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent; Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump; and The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. In 2011, he was among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. He is a professor in the department of economics at Columbia University and founder and president of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think-tank on international development based at the university.

In this interview, Stiglitz explains the impact of globalisation in the last two decades, and of populism, the rise of the gig economy, and the problem of inequality in India and the world. Edited excerpts: