UNU-MERIT UNESCO Chair event examines investment strategies for climate and development goals When it comes to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, who will finance the investments needed to do so, and will the funding sources be domestic or foreign, public or private, or from debts or grants? And, in a macroeconomic context, how can we ensure that such investments will have their desired effects on the green transitions of nations? These are the questions Andrés Velasco, Dean of the ...

Time will tell, but today, one and a half years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “gloom-and-doom” predictions of worldwide recession, major disruptions in international trade, and rapidly rising unemployment appear to have been exaggerated. As the International Monetary Fund pointed out, the 2008/2009 financial crisis had a much more negative impact on the economy than either a “typical” recession or past “modern” pandemics (see Figure below).[1] Of course, the current COVID-19 p...

We are very happy to announce that Prof Kristof de Witte, our chair in Effectiveness and Efficiency of Educational Innovations, has been named Laureate of the Academy – Humanities 2020 by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. This is the academy’s most prestigious award and is only the second time that the award has gone to an economist. Kristof, who is based at KU Leuven across the border in Belgium, explains how: “As an educational economist, I examin...

While the rise of populist politicians in the Europe and the US gets a lot of attention from the media and researchers alike, the drivers of the populism taking hold in emerging and developing economies still receives relatively little scrutiny. In a new working paper we provide new evidence tracing the rise of populism in Brazil – through both the victory of presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002 and Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 – to regional economic shocks caused by a process of trade liberal...

Water is not only critical for human life – it is also a precious economic, spiritual and cultural resource. In 2015, the UN General Assembly even recognised water as a human right. This newly minted human right is, however, under threat from trade and investment agreements, including the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). Now, wherever they operate, companies can sue governments for discrimination. This may sound reasonable, but there is already an overwhelming number of cases involving ...

Not the ‘classic’ Italian-Argentinian migration history, ours is more about those left behind and a return to the home country. Gaetano Bloise was born in 1895 in Cassano, a village in Calabria, the southmost region on the Italian peninsula. During World War I, he was injured at the infamous Battle of Caporetto, the worst defeat in Italian military history. Soon after he returned to Cassano, opened a grocery shop, and married Maria Ciappetta (1894-1975), with whom he raised four children in pove...

A joint post by Sam Jones, Eva-Maria Egger and Ricardo Santos, United Nations University – WIDER As the COVID-19 virus has spread across the globe, developing countries are starting to enact many of the same policies used in China, Europe and North America to contain the virus. But are these policies appropriate in low income contexts? To help think about this we propose a simple index of lockdown readiness which identifies the share of households that could feasibly shelter at home for a ...

A post by Mantej Pardesi, alumnus of our Master’s programme in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP). … The novel coronavirus has put an emergency brake on the express train of our global economy. This single-celled micro-organism has grounded fleets of jumbo jets, crashed stock markets, stopped production in industrial factories and suffocated the economy. In so doing it has uncovered alarming fault lines in the world of work. Many people in the knowledge economy are able to wor...

The European Observatory for Clusters and Industrial Change has published the 2020 edition of the European Panorama of Clusters and Industrial Change, written by UNU-MERIT researchers Hugo Hollanders and Iris Merkelbach. The report presents an overview of how clusters contribute to the competitiveness of the European economy. It analyses cluster strength across 51 exporting industry sectors in Europe and identifies 2,950 regional industrial clusters. These industrial clusters account for almost ...

The exponential growth of data and artificial intelligence is creating a tug-of-war between data for profit and data for the common good. In this struggle, it is fundamental that we protect our basic human data rights. Artificial intelligence will someday know you better than you know yourself. That day may be sooner than we realise with the amount of data collected on all humans and their environments increasing exponentially. So where are the rules, and what are our rights?...