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| An Announcement for the second Latin American Advanced Programme on Rethinking Macro and Development Economics, hosted by the São Paulo School of Economics, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, São Paulo, Brazil 11 January – 15 January 2010 |
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With support from FAPESP and Ordem dos Economistas do Brasil, the São Paulo School of Economics is hosting an advanced summer programme on rethinking macro and development economics for the second time in Sao Paulo. The programme builds on the experience of the successful Cambridge Advance Programme on Rethinking Development Economics (CAPORDE) that has been running in Cambridge, UK, for the last eight years and will be held for the second time at the São Paulo School of Economics, São Paulo, between 11th January and 15th January 2010. The programme will admit a select group of 30 or so young academics from developing countries with a focus in Latin America, and provide them with lectures, discussions, and research workshops with leading scholars on cutting edge topics in macro and development economics from a number of critical perspectives. There will be no tuition fees for the course.
Background
The failure of various recent reforms in numerous developing and transition economies to generate longterm growth and reduce poverty have generated such criticism that even the IMF has recently felt obliged to proclaim poverty reduction as its official goal. At the same time, as most dramatically demonstrated in the collapses of talks of the WTO, there is an increasing dissatisfaction both in the developing and the developed countries with the emerging global economic order. The disillusionment with the orthodoxy now exists even at the heart of the “establishment”, as it has been so powerfully demonstrated by the events surrounding the resignations of Joseph Stiglitz and Ravi Kanbur from the World Bank some years ago.
In the wake of the biggest crisis in 80 years the reputation of orthodox economics has taken a beating. The profession is now suffering from guilt and rancour. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics”.
If there is an increasing demand for an alternative to this orthodoxy, the supply is not meeting it. The older generation of development economists of the 1960s and the 1970s vintage have been, over the last few decades, edged out of most major universities in international centers of academic excellence, especially the major US universities. The situation in most developing countries are even worse. While in these countries there may be more demand for alternatives to orthodox development economics, these countries have even less capability to generate such alternatives. Due to, among other things, resource constraints, researchers and students from developing countries tend to rely on a small number of standard textbooks and the publications from the multilateral financial institutions, which severely restricts their exposure to alternative approaches.
The Programme
The programme intends to fill this important intellectual gap. It will give a select group of 30 or so young academics from developing countries with a focus in Latin America an opportunity to gain exposure to frontier research undertaken from critical perspectives on key issues in development and macroeconomics. The teaching will be conducted through lectures and discussions provided by some of the world’s leading academics in relevant fields. Each day of the workshop will consist of two sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and one short night talk. Each session lasts three-and-half hours. The sessions will be mostly in the form of lectures, which will consist of at least two hours of lecturing and at least 30 minutes of discussions with some breaks. Lectures will be given in English. There will be also informal contacts between students and faculty during lunch, tea and coffee breaks, and possibly some dinners. The details of the provisional programme is attached at the end of this announcement. |
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