Regional integration in theory and practice

The Poverty Reduction, Equity, and Growth Network (PEGNet) Conference 2016 will be held at the College of Business and Economics, University of Rwanda in Kigali, Rwanda on September 15-16 2016.

The Conference will provide a platform for high-level dialogue between development researchers, practitioners and policy-makers working on Poverty Reduction, Inequality, Growth and other related topics in Development Economics. The two conference days will feature parallel-sessions based on invited and contributed papers and project presentations. These will be complemented by a debate, a round-table discussion, and keynote speeches by renowned speakers from academia, economic policy and development practice.

In addition, the PEGNet Best-Practice Award will be granted to a project that demonstrates best practice in cooperation between researchers and practitioners for the eighth time. This call therefore invites the submission of papers as well as projects, programs and initiatives that are eligible for this prize.

Conference theme

The plenary sessions will address the challenges and opportunities that accompany regional integration in Sub-Saharan Africa while the parallel sessions will cover a range of themes in development economics that include but are not restricted to regional integration. To facilitate a lively discussion we invite high-quality papers, innovative projects and comparative works that provide solutions to the following questions:

• How will new regional integration attempts such as the TFTA address some of the challenges such as overlapping boundaries that have hindered past integration efforts?
• Can regional economic integration succeed in dealing with the differences that arise from heterogeneities in logistics, infrastructure, communication, fiscal regimes, geography and demographics?
• How can regional integration enhance efforts aimed at combating regional crises such as the current energy crisis faced by many SADC countries or even the recent wave of political instability in the ECOWAS region?
• How can regional integration schemes raise the competitiveness of land-locked countries?
• How can regional integration schemes raise the attractiveness of small countries for foreign direct investment (FDI)?
• What are promising value chains that could be explored by regional integration?
• What would it take Africa to seize the opportunities that regional integration offers for economic transformation?
• Are there lessons that can be emulated from the European model of regional integration for Africa?

Best-practice award

The Best-Practice Award will be granted to programmes, projects, and initiatives that have achieved effective interaction between research and practice. Initiatives and development projects or programmes that have incorporated research tools into their design or research projects that have been particularly successful in translating their findings into policy and practice are encouraged to apply. Initiatives targeted at improving dialogue between researchers and practitioners are also encouraged to apply. The proposed projects can address any broad topic in development economics and do not have to be closely related to the conference theme.

Selection procedures

Contributed papers and projects will be selected based on extended abstracts written either on the conference theme or on other topics in development economics. Priority will be given to empirical research with clear implications for policy design and implementation.

For the Best-Practice Award, a maximum of four projects will be selected by a committee based on a three-page summary that highlights the initiative’s objectives, the type of interaction between research and practice as well as its results. The pre-selected projects will be asked to submit one additional paper or report. At the conference, each nominated initiative will be presented and the winner of a prize of Euro 3000 will be selected by the committee.

Please email your abstracts and project summaries to pegnet@ifw-kiel.de in a pdf or Word file indicating ‘PEGNet Conference 2016’ in the subject heading. Abstracts should have more than 400 words but should not exceed three pages. The submission deadline is 29 April 2016. Notification of acceptance will be sent out in mid-June 2014. The deadline for full paper submission and additional material for the Best Practice Award is 1 August 2016.

For more information on the PEGNet please refer to http://www.pegnet.ifw-kiel.de/