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The science of complex systems can play an important role in understanding social and economic dynamics but its application to economics has not yet been fully explored.  The most pressing challenges in science and society are frequently too complex for any single discipline to tackle alone, necessitating a problem-solving approach that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. Recently, the science of complex systems has gained considerable recognition, including the award of the Nobel Prize in 2021 to Giorgio Parisi for his research on this topic, but its potential in illuminating socio-economic systems has yet to be fully explored.  Economic systems are particularly complex. Compose...

In the second webinar of the UNESCO Chair series on ‘Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for Sustainable Development in Latin America’, Dr. Pascual Restrepo (Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University) gave a presentation on the ‘Origins and implications of the current wave of automation technologies’. Dr. Maria Savona, Professor of Economics of Innovation at SPRU & Professor of Applied Economics at LUISS University, acted as a discussant. The seminar was held on 14 March 2023, and after the presentation, Prof. Dr. Carlo Pietrobelli from UNU-MERIT’s UNESCO Chair team interviewed the speakers. Pietrobelli asked key questions on the followin...

World Water Day – held on 22 March every year since 1993 – raises awareness and inspires action to help the 2.2 billion people who are living today without access to safe water. At UNU-MERIT, we’re excited to share that we have three World Water Day (WWD) events coming up that all aim to raise awareness and inspire action around this year’s WWD theme, which is about accelerating change to solve the water and sanitation crisis. The first two of these events are virtual side events of the UN 2023 Water Conference taking place in New York next week: 💧 Monday 20 March at 15:00 – 16:30 CET (online) Water for Climate Mental Health Resilience – Integrating inclus...

A post by Laura Cleton, researcher at UNU-MERIT. Today, 8 March, is International Women’s Day: a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It also marks a call to action to educate and raise awareness for women’s equality and call for positive change advancing the position of women. At UNU-MERIT, researchers on migration and development – including myself – do so by pointing to the gendered nature of international migration and developmental impacts. Gender scholars argue that phenomena like migration are inherently gendered: not just because of their differential impacts on women and men, but also because gendered identities and power structu...

Last week at UNU-MERIT, we held our first-ever PhD Research Week, an intensive five-day event where we gathered all of our full-time and part-time PhD fellows together in person to present their research to each other and to staff members. But it wasn’t only about work – the group also enjoyed a social evening out bowling! Here’s what some of our attendees had to say about this memorable week:   Curious about UNU-MERIT’s PhD programme on Innovation, Governance and Sustainable Development? There are just 13 days left to apply to our programme if you want to start your PhD in September 2023 (application deadline: 28 February 2023)! Read more about the exciting full-time ...

Today marks the end of our PhD Research Week and to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, this blog post is dedicated to the work of five of our talented female PhD fellows who are all working on topics related to gender and the empowerment of women and girls.             Here at UNU-MERIT, we feel that it’s crucial to have researchers such as these five women working in these fields because they allow us to achieve our mandate of bringing evidence-based research to policymakers and society as a whole. Providing knowledge and awareness around these topics can improve people’s lives – particularly the lives of women and ...

Paul David – who passed away on January 23rd 2023 – was not just a brilliant economic historian and an exceptional scholar of the economics of technology who established the Stanford economics department as one of the leading research centres in the field, he was also very much a European academic in heart and mind.[1] He was followed over the different decades of his long career by an expanding community of David “groupies”: close academic friends, young and old who loved to listen and enter into debates with him over a similarly expanding range of particular policy attention-grabbing topics. Paul’s detailed historical knowledge of the emergence and diffusion of particular techn...

 United Nations University – MERIT · Director’s Corner Podcast – Jan 2023   In this episode of the Director’s Corner Podcast, Director Bartel Van de Walle speaks with Holly Tammik, new Communications Officer at UNU-MERIT.  In this conversation, Bartel shares among other things:  his goals for the institute in 2023   details about how the Comprehensive Innovation for Sustainable Development themes will be relaunched with the help of Dr Rasmus Lema, Associate Professor  a reflection on the best UNU-MERIT moments of the past 2.5 years  what he thinks will be the themes and trends to look out for in UNU-MERIT’s fields of work in the coming year.  He also answers Hol...

Our quarterly newsletter rounds up the latest news and events from UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance. We explore the push and pull of international development: innovation through science and entrepreneurship, and governance through public policy analysis. ...

Using a Brazilian university as a case study, can international mobility shape students’ attitudes toward inequality? How can we implement more secure, more sustainable and more efficient migration governance? These are just two questions that have been tackled by our researchers in January 2023 — in two journal articles, a research report, three working papers and three PhD dissertations, among others. Click here for the full list of our most recent publications. Journal articles ‘Vertical taxing rights and tax compliance norms‘ investigates the effects of multi-layer tax arrangements on tax compliance norms and behaviours of individuals in 49 Latin American and African co...

Evidence suggests that millions of individuals are disregarded in risk and vulnerability analyses due to a lack of sufficient data. In her master’s thesis research, Katherine Bruni (recent MPP alumna) tried to identify a baseline understanding of the exposure, susceptibility and adaptive capacity of stateless Kurdish populations in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Katherine: During my time as a student in the 2021-22 cohort of the UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University Master of Public Policy programme, I researched how the legal concept of statelessness influences individuals’ vulnerability to slow-onset climate change-induced events, such as land degradation and water scarcity. Underpinnin...

Matilde Perotti (alumna of the MPP 2021-22 cohort) outlines the challenges of undertaking research on disaster risk management in refugee camps, drawing on her firsthand experiences of working in a number of challenging situations. I am a graduate of International Relations and Global Affairs, and I have recently finished my double-degree master’s in Public Policy from the United Nations University in Maastricht, specialising in migration studies. My thesis was on the role of NGOs in natural disasters, specifically in the temporary refugee camp of Kara Tepe on the Greek island of Lesvos. I mainly focused on how disaster risk management is implemented in the camp and how the community e...

UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe UNU-MERIT is delighted to announce that it has formally become an Academy Training Centre, as part of the International Telecommunications Union’s Academy Training Centre programme.  This programme takes the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU’s) capacity development work forward into the future. It will directly contribute to building knowledge and skills among professionals in the ICT field, thus enabling them to contribute to – and fully participate in – the digital transformation. ITU Academy Training Centres (ATCs) are internationally recognised institutions offering high-quality training to intermediate and senior personnel, with a focus on the ...

A post by Dr Zina Nimeh UNU-MERIT mourns the loss of a dear colleague, professor, educator and humanist who passed away on 30 December. Michael Cichon had a long-standing relationship with UNU-MERIT as an honorary professor and as the driving force behind the establishment of the master’s program in Social Protection Financing (SPF), which was launched in 2001 in collaboration between the International Labour Organization (ILO) with Maastricht University. The SPF masters was the program that eventually developed into what is currently the Masters of Public Policy (MPP) at UNU-MERIT, and continues to this day through the social protection specialisation. Michael often said that this was the m...

Prof  Dr Jo Ritzen is an Honorary Professor at UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University. He served as Minister of Education, Culture, and Science of the Netherlands from 1989 to 1998, becoming the longest-serving Education Minister in the EU. Subsequently, he was appointed Vice-President of the World Bank (1998–2003) and President of Maastricht University (2003–2011). His current research interests revolve around trust in government and sustainability issues, and he is also leading an initiative to improve long-term decision-making in the Dutch Parliament. In this interview, Prof. Ritzen sits with Leopoldo Pérez Obregón, Digital Communications Officer at UNU-MERIT, to discuss these topics. LPO: W...

Last week, a delegation from the City Council visited UNU-MERIT to explore ways to further our partnership. The City’s delegation comprised Ms Anita Bastiaans, Alderman for Welfare, Diversity, Civic Integration, Euregio and Europe; Mr Johan Pas, Alderman for Housing, Education, Student City & Welfare; Mr Florian Wijnants, Policy Officer. UNU-MERIT’s Director, Prof Bartel Van de Walle, delivered a presentation of the Institute’s Strategic Plan (2021-2025), where he outlined our research agenda and our education programmes. He emphasised the newly established Computational Innovation Lab and the Policy Action Lab, which will help deliver the Institute’s mission to harness technological inn...

During the first webinar of the UNESCO Chair series on ”Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for Sustainable Development in Latin America”, Prof. Gabriela Dutrénit  (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, México) gave a presentation on “STI Policy, development strategy and social inclusion”. Gonzalo Rivas, Chief of the Competitiveness, Technology and Innovation Division of the Interamerican Development Bank (IADB), acted as discussant. The seminar was held on 6 December, and after the presentation the UNESCO Chair team interviewed the speakers. How does STI policies help to solve social inclusion problems? Gabriel Dutrénit: First, I believe that STI pol...

We aim to enhance understanding of multifaceted impacts of climate change and related hazards on mental health and psychosocial well-being by capturing reflections from different geographic regions and their capacities to integrate support services in climate response strategies. Speakers: Xiaomeng Shen(UNU-EHS) Nidhi Nagabhatla(UNU-CRIS) Sanae Okamoto(UNU-MERIT) Robert Oakes(UNU-EHS) Kariuki Weru(UNU-EHS) Soo Chen Kwan(UNU-IIGH) Charlotte Scheerens(UNU-CRIS) Kehkashan Basu(Green Hope Foundation) Elena Villalobos Prats(WHO) Sophie Lee (UNICEF) Michela Miletto (UNESCO)...

Article originally published in Morse In the recent years, we all observed how countries and institutions relied on digital tools to deal with the COVID shocks. For example, at Maastricht University, with the help of the digital learning management system and meeting software Canvas, Zoom and MS Teams we were able to continue our education provision and research activities. It is almost unimaginable that we would have been able to offer our courses during the pandemic without those digital tools and services. Yet, we should not forget that using the tools and services requires digital skills. The term e-resilience captures societies’ reliance on ICT in periods of shock. E-resilience is...

  As part of UNU-MERIT’s UNESCO Chair on Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for Sustainable Development for Latin America, we proudly announce our series of webinars on Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for Sustainable Development in Latin America. The meetings will be framed around four main challenges for STI policies in the region. These topics crucially depend on the intrinsic characteristics of the region, as well as on global trends in the changing techno-economic paradigm. The challenges include: The search for appropriate institutions and governance for STI policies; The multifold impact of automation and digital transitions; Energy transition and sustai...