News

PhD fellow Gloria Bernal, from our GPAC2 cohort 2017, has won a scholarship from the Netherlands Fellowship Programme (NFP). One of only two beneficiaries from Maastricht University in the 2016 round, she currently works as a teacher at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. ̷...

Shyama V. Ramani, Professor of Development Economics at UNU-MERIT, has been working on the issue of sanitation since the tsunami of December 2004. It all started as a charity project to build toilets for women in a small coastal village in Tamil Nadu, her home state in the southernmost part of India...

A joint post by Prof. Wim Naudé and Dr. Paula Nagler. — Society has perhaps never been more unequal than at present, in terms of the distribution of income and wealth. Within-country income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) is, according to the UN Development Programme, “more un...

In December 2016, the University of Khartoum in Sudan, East Africa, approved the promotion of Dr. Samia Satti Osman Mohamed Nour to the status of full Professor of Economics. Prior to this, she gained a PhD in Economics from Maastricht University in 2005 and remains an Affiliated Researcher at UNU-M...

Takahiro Utsumi is one of our many students who also works for another UN organisation — in this case the World Food Programme (WFP) in Khartoum, Sudan. He came to Maastricht for our unique course on Evidence-Based Policy Research Methods (EPRM), to improve his everyday work and long-term career as ...

‘Savages, monkeys … go back to the jungle!’ was the ghastly woven prose splashed across my door, the day after I arrived in Belgium. It was 23 August 2002. I was living with my cousin in the heart of the Molenbeek district, now sadly famous for other reasons. ...

A joint post by Dr. Katie Kuschminder, EUI / UNU-MERIT and Prof. Khalid Koser, UNU-MERIT. — The European Commission has decided to start returning migrants from other European countries back to Greece, lifting a ban on the practice that was put in place in 2011. The decision is influenced by c...

Many countries with large reserves of natural resources have failed to achieve higher living standards – countries like Brazil, Chile, South Africa and Peru. Can too much of a good thing be somehow ‘bad’ for the wealth and welfare of countries? The debate has raged on for decades. On the one hand, t...

On 14 December 2016, UNU HQ in Tokyo hosted ‘Paradoxes in Higher Education‘, a conversation with Professor Luc Soete, Chairman of the EU Research, Innovation, and Science Policy Experts High Level Group and former Director of UNU-MERIT. Investments in education are essential for the sust...

A joint post by Shivani Achrekar and Dr. Mindel van de Laar. In e-learning courses, fully online or blended, the biggest challenge for course providers is to ensure retention, allowing participants to finish their online course. While sign-up rates can look promising, drop-out rates are often high, ...

I identify strongly as a migration researcher. So I sometimes feel inadequate next to all my colleagues who can brandish intriguing migration histories from their own lives. My story seems parochial by comparison: I was born and raised in Oslo, Norway, and so were both my parents. I still call Oslo ...

Gender is often seen as an isolated one-dimensional issue, rather than for what it is – a multilayered concept touching all of society, including research and policy. Why are we highlighting this today? Because 25th November is the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Violence ag...

In 2013, India became the fourth country in the world (after Russia, the United States and the European Union) and the only emerging nation to launch a Mars probe into space. But it remains part of the group of 45 developing countries with less than 50% sanitation coverage, with many citizens practi...

The inaugural Public Policy in-house conference, 21 October 2016, was an opportunity for four members of the 2016/2017 MPP cohort to present their analyses of key policy issues from their home countries. The presenters were selected based not only on quality but also on diversity, region, and topic ...

Trump may lose, but will that be the end of ‘Trumpism’? As I write this in late October 2016, Washington DC is a divided city in a divided country. I am struck by the imminent sense of disaster — and the clearest sign of this is what we DON’T see, just days before the election on 8th November....

By Dr. Özge Bilgili and Veronika Fajth In today’s world, international migration not only affects those who are on the move but the vast majority of the global population. In this new era of hyper-connectedness, many of our actions have transnational ramifications, reaching many other people across ...

The Journal of Population Economics, an independent and international quarterly journal that publishes original theoretical and applied research in all areas of population economics, has been hosted by the ‘POP Centre‘ at UNU-MERIT since April 2016. Issue 1/2017, published on 29 October ...

Like most Americans, I have a pretty mixed up immigrant background: in my case from Sweden, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Russia. My mother’s family emigrated from Sweden during the ‘great wave’ of migration between the 1880s and the 1920s....

“We should… recognize the United Nations for what it is – an admittedly imperfect but indispensable instrument of nations working for a peaceful evolution towards a more just and secure world order.” These words, written over half a century ago by Former UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, remai...

This year’s 19th European Health Forum Gastein (EHFG) took the guiding theme of ‘Demographics & Diversity in Europe – New Solutions for Health’. As the leading event of its kind, the Forum aims to develop European health policy with input from national and regional authorities and decisionmaking...