Anti-poverty advocate to speak at Monash
Professor Abhijit Banerjee
One of the world’s leading advocates in the fight against poverty is coming to Melbourne to present a public lecture on development economics.
Professor Abhijit Banerjee, currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, will be the keynote speaker at the 8th Australasian Development Economic Workshop at Monash University’s Caulfield campus this week.
Professor Lisa Cameron, Director for the Centre for Development Economics, said that given the Australian Government’s recent $2.9 billion cut to the foreign aid, the workshop – and Professor Banerjee’s participation in it – was particularly timely.
“It is a truly a privilege to have someone of Professor Banerjee’s standing talk to us about the problems facing the world’s poor and the most effective ways of overcoming these problems,” Professor Cameron said.
“He will use five examples, taken from his latest best seller Poor Economics, to illustrate the difference between what we know and what actions we take to alleviate poverty around the world.”
The annual workshop, sponsored by AusAID and presented by the Monash Centre for Development Economics, brings together development economists from Australia and around the world, with a particular emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region.
Professor Banerjee’s areas of research are development economics and economic theory. He is the author of a large number of articles and three books, including Poor Economics which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year.
In 2003 Professor Banerjee, along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a network of 65 developmental economists from around the world, to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation.
Professor Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, and an International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute.
Professor Banerjee will deliver his lecture ‘Poor Economics’ at 4pm, Thursday 7 June in Room 14, Level 2, Building B, Monash University Caulfield campus. The workshop will be held on 7 and 8 June.