Ashwini Deshpande is Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. Her PhD and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action issues, with a focus on caste and gender in India, as well as on aspects of the Chinese economy: role of FDI in the reform process, regional disparities, and gender discrimination. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals.
She is the author of Grammar of Caste: economic discrimination in contemporary India (2011). She has co-edited Global Economic Crisis and the developing world (2012) with Keith Nurse; edited Capital without borders: challenges to development (2010); edited Globalization and Development: A Handbook of New Perspective (2007) and co-edited Boundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational studies of inter-group disparity with William Darity, Jr. (2003).
She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IEDRA Award) in 1994, and the 2007 VKRV Rao Award for Indian economists under 45.