Taking a stand for evidence-based approaches, we delivered a course on Science Reporting at the City of Knowledge in Panama, 12-16 December 2016. The workshop title, ‘Reach & Turn’, referred to reaching out, turning heads, and shifting mindsets – in many ways the core of communications....

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. … Gloria, what made you apply to the GPAC2 programme? I think the GPAC2 programme provides a great combination of academic rigour and time flexibility. It allows me to conduct high quality research w...

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, the ‘pessimistic’ view says that a relative abundance of resources is a ‘curse’ for development: since it produces incentives to rent-seeking behaviour and lack of knowledge linkages with the rest of t...

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...

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....

I was born in a country of immigrants. During the first half of the 20th century, when Europe was suffering from wars, dictatorships and economic crises, Argentina was welcoming migrants and giving them residence permits upon arrival at the port of Buenos Aires. Easy as that!...

Our latest workshop on the ‘Design and Evaluation of Innovation Policies’ (DEIP) was co-hosted in January 2016 by UNU-MERIT, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and Panama’s National Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation (SENACYT). This four-day course gathered around 40 policymakers from Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras, as well as innovation experts from around the world. To put things in context, we spoke with a number of local representatives, including Ga...

How can Latin American and Caribbean economies improve their productivity? How can we ensure more effective governance of labour migration from South Asia? How can we build on international research partnerships? Just a few of the questions tackled by UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance in October 2015 — in three working papers, two research reports, and two PhD defences, among others. Click here for the full list. Working Papers ‘The performance of firms in Latin America and the ...

This informal and interactive session provided a brief overview of the migration trends in Central America and, specifically, the issue of unaccompanied migrant children from the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala). The session presented some examples of current challenges faced by migration practitioners and provided a brief overview of what the Inter-American Development Bank and multilateral development banks do.  ...

Described as “an astonishing inspiration for leaders around the world for how to mobilise people, create change in your local community and see the international effects,” PhD alumnus and affiliated researcher Dr. Carlos Cadena Gaitan has won the 2015 Future Sustainability Leader award. “This year’s… campaign searched for nominations for the best and brightest future leaders in sustainability that are mobilising for change and making us all seize new opportunities,”...