Social Science Activities

Growth, development, inequality and poverty

GABRIELA RAMOS, OECD Chief of Staff and Sherpa to the G7 and G20, called for a new economy and a "more inclusive, equal and sustainable growth from all angles, not just environmental" in the framework of the Understanding the economy and how to make it work better for people, jointly organized with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 

In this seminar, renowned experts discussed how to develop a systemic perspective that allows addressing interrelated challenges, the tools and techniques necessary to understand them, and the design of policies that ensure that economic growth is shared equally in society and creates opportunities for all.

The level of heterogeneity in the developing world has grown significantly in the last two decades.  The North-South division has given way to a more diverse and heterogeneous world where international inequalities remain, but along a more graduated spectrum of development levels among countries. This complexity was analyzed in the Panel Discussion Rethinking development in a more complex world.

Pioneering research works on economic development policies were presented at the 8th NCID RESEARCH WORKSHOP of the University of Navarra. At a public lecture, Romain Wacziarg, Professor of Economics at UCLA, spoke about Historical Barriers to the Wealth of Nations. He introduced the term "cultural distance" to explain the factors — mainly geographic, linguistic, and genetic — that unite or separate countries.

For their experimental approach to alleviating world poverty, Professors Abhijit Banerjee (MIT), Esther Duflo (MIT) and Michael Kremer (Harvard University) were awarded the 2019 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. At the round table Nobel Prize in Economics 2019: The experimental strategy in the fight against poverty, jointly organized with the Spanish Association of Economics (AEE), the contributions of the Nobel Prize winners were discussed.

The Master Lesson of the London School of Economics Inequality & Social Cohesion: A Global Perspective addressed the psychological perspective of inequality and how it influences the way we think about ourselves and about others; the inequalities between and within countries; and health inequalities from the perspective of social cohesion.

THOMAS PIKETTY, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, explained at an Expert Seminar his theories on the origin of inequality. For the French economist, one of the current challenges is that only some elites are being benefited by the advances that are taking place in terms of globalization or regional integration.

We present the categories in which the Social Sciences activities of the year 2019 are included: