Ana Cristina Calderon Ramirez, a PhD Fellow on our GPAC² programme, has beaten around 100 other researchers to win Best Paper Award at the International Public Procurement Conference 7 (IPPC7). The paper, ‘Elements of public procurement reform and their effect on the public sector in Latin America and the Caribbean’, was co-authored with Leslie Elizabeth Harper and Jorge Enrique Muñoz Ayala, but the main idea came from the PhD dissertation of Calderon Ramirez. She will now present at...
“I was born in Uganda, I am Rwandan, but I grew up in South Africa.” This is my standard response to the question “Where are you from?” – because I genuinely feel like I am from all three countries....
Dr. Özge Bilgili, Theme Leader for Integration, Social Cohesion and Transnationalism Research, has been selected for the OECD’s Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship for 2017. During the project period at the Directorate for Education and Skills in Paris, she will focus on migrant children’s educational achievement and socio-cultural integration. Specifically, she will examine the questions of migration by comparing first and second generation immigrant students with their non-immigrant peers in the PI...
As we approach the first anniversary of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), on 25 September 2016, at least one thing is clear: nothing will be achieved without a joined-up approach and an integrated strategy. In practice, this means that the UN’s silos will need to start talking the same language. It’s not about dumbing down; quite the opposite, in fact. It’s about better understanding the work done by partners, including all the nuances and intricacies, so that we can work more effecti...
This year, we stayed in our own new Sphinxkwartier neighbourhood to celebrate the closing ceremony of our Master’s programme in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP). The Muziekgieterij, the Maastricht pop concert hall located a few minutes down the Boschstraat in the renovated Timmerfabriek, Maastricht’s former carpentry factory, provided a rough and original old industrial setting for the festive event. The MPP closing ceremony marks the end of the academic year and serves as a...
The annual European Innovation Scoreboard, co-authored by Hugo Hollanders, Nordine Es-Sadki and Minna Kanerva, provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU Member States, other European countries, and regional neighbours. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems and helps countries identify areas they need to address. According to the 2016 Scoreboard, the EU is continuing to catch up with global innovation leaders. But innovation is still he...
Around 168 million children worldwide are involved in child labour, according to recent ILO estimates. More than half of them, 85 million, are doing hazardous work. These numbers have fallen in recent years, but trends vary across regions, countries and sectors and the figures remain alarmingly high. In that context, impact evaluation can help policymakers to best target their interventions. Part-time PhD fellow Julia Brümmer explains the background to her research. … You just presented yo...
Alumnus and affiliated researcher Dr. Richard Bluhm has won this year’s Prize for Excellence in Applied Development Research from the German Economic Association (VfS). He was awarded first prize in the Young Researcher category for his doctoral thesis on ‘Growth Dynamics and Development. Essays in Applied Econometrics and Political Economy’. “Understanding why some countries are poor and others are rich, and how this gap can be closed, remains the most fundamental problem in development e...
When Isaac Attie arrived in Bolivia in 1917, he brought all his worldly belongings in a single suitcase. He had travelled to Latin America in search of a safer and better life: far from the conflict and turmoil of Europe and the Middle East....
“Almost three quarters (73%) of 18 to 24-year-olds said they had voted to stay in the EU, compared with 62% of 25 to 34s and 52% of 35 to 44s,” noted a BBC article after last week’s referendum. But “support for Brexit formed a majority among every other age category and grew with each, peaking at 60% among those aged 65 and over.” Which begs the question — as younger generations will have to live longer with the economic, environmental and political decisions ...