Inequality – and how to deal with it

The conference will provide a platform for high-level dialogue between development researchers, practitioners and policy-makers. 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 Giovanni Andrea Cornia from the University of Florence as well as Christoph Lakner from the World Bank.

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 ninth time. This call for papers thus 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 of rising national inequality in developing countries while the parallel sessions will cover a range of themes in development economics that include but are not restricted to inequality. To facilitate a lively discussion we invite high-quality papers, innovative projects and comparative works that provide solutions to the following questions:

• What measures of inequality are more pertinent for developing countries?
• Does the current data used in developing countries provide a representative picture of inequality trends?
• Is a certain amount of inequality conducive for growth?
• What is the role of globalisation for increasing inequalities in developing countries?
• What is the role of land reform, educational policies, rural infrastructure and improvements of agricultural productivity for reducing inequality?
• What role can development cooperation play in curbing rising inequality?
• What institutional arrangements need to be put in place to close the income gap between the rich and the poor in developing countries?
• How to design growth-and equity-enhancing tax systems?
• What is the role of regulating global financial markets and institutions in reducing national inequalities?

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 three-page 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 € 3,000 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 2017’ in the subject heading. Abstracts should not exceed three pages. The submission deadline is 1 May 2017. Notification of acceptance will be sent out at the end of June 2017. The deadline for full paper submission and additional material for the Best Practice Award is 1 August 2017.

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