Author: Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

Lecturer in International Development.

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Economic Development Events INET

Debating Development Conference

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Last month a group of us at The New School and the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative working group on Economic Development organized an interdisciplinary and critical conference on regional challenges and competing theories of development. The Debating Development conference brought together professors and students from a variety of regions, institutions, and disciplines. Read more about (and join!) the YSI Economic Development working group.

Coverage and footage of the conference

Continue reading “Debating Development Conference”
Categories
Microfinance Publications

Financial Inclusion and Its Discontents

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Paulo dos Santos and I criticize the micro-finance hype in development and call for a broader development agenda in a Private Debt Project article.

 

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Development Finance Publications

Article in ‘Development Finance Agenda’

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An article I previously published on the blog RightingFinance has been re-published in Volume 2, Issue 1 (2016) of the journal Development Finance Agenda (DEFA), which is published by the Chartered Institute of Development Finance (CIDEF). You can read more about this issue here.

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Events NSER

New issue of The New School Economic Review (NSER)

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Last week the 8th volume of the New School Economic Review (NSER) was released! This was a huge accomplishment for us after having worked on this issue for a whole year. The issue had a record number of submissions, so we have had to coordinate with a growing number of reviewers to make sure we gave each submission a fair assessment. We’re very pleased with the final outcome, so please take a look! This is the second volume I have worked on as Executive Editor (also volume 7), but I am now stepping down in order to give others the opportunity to do this job as well as to give myself more time to work on my own research.  You can still submit to Vol. 9: The deadline is March 15th!

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Heterodox Economics In the media Norway-related Publications

The Norwegian Debate on Neoclassical Economics

In the wake of the release of a critical book on Neoclassical Economics in Norway, a heated debate on the state of the field of Economics has unfolded in Norwegian media. Norwegian Economics Professors argue that they are not Neoclassical (although they use Neoclassical methods such as general equilibrium analysis), that it’s impossible to do Economics outside of an equilibrium framework, and that alternative theories are so small that they are not worth teaching. My Norwegian colleague at The New School, Ebba Boye, and I entered the debate last week, by pointing out that Economics has not always been synonymous to Neoclassical Economics, that there are non-Neoclassical theories that have strong explanatory power, and that it is  possible – and desirable! – to learn a variety of Economic theories in one degree program. Here’s our Op-ed in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen: Økonomisk innsikt utenfor mainstream.

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Africa Events INET

Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong

Some colleagues in the YSI Economic Development group and I organized a discussion with economic historian Morten Jerven a couple of weeks ago, which was interesting and thought-provoking. The talk was largely based on his book Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong. Here are some reactions we had to the presentation.

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Op-ed SDGs

3 new op-eds on the SDGs

In English:
Can development goals help development finance? If so, how? (Righting Finance, October 20th, 2015)

In Norwegian:
Globale mål: Hvorfor, hvordan og for hvem? (Ny Tid, November 12th 2015)
FNs bærekraftsmål: Manglende kobling mellom mål og middel (Gjeldsbrevet, December 15th 2015)

In addition, there’s the FT article from this summer that I wrote with Sanjay Reddy on the same topic: Does the world really need development goals?

Categories
Economic Development Publications SDGs

Global Development Goals: If at All, Why, When and How? (new paper)

New School Professor Sanjay Reddy and are publishing our paper on global goals today. We raise some basic conceptual questions regarding global development goals: Why have them at all? What function, if any, might they serve, and under what conditions could they do so successfully? Based on our answers to these questions, we identify serious inadequacies in the contemporary approach to development goals and relate these to weaknesses in how the goals were conceived and formulated. Despite these failings, higher-level goals may play a useful role if the practical approach to them is embedded in a holistic and integrated vision of a better world. Focusing on goals rather than targets opens needed space for flexibility, innovation, and fuller democratic accountability.

Download the working paper here (SSRN) and read my blog post on the New School Economic Review here.

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Economic Development Op-ed Publications SDGs

Global Goals: For What? (Op-ed)

On August 28th 2015, Professor Sanjay Reddy and I published an op-ed on the Financial Times blog, BeyondBrics. In the op-ed we discuss the purpose of global development goals, as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are about to be adopted. Read a slightly extended version on Sanjay Reddy’s blog.

 

Categories
Economic Development Events

Comments to UN WESS report

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In February this year, I attended a two-day Expert Group Meeting at the UN in New York on the draft chapters of World Economic and Social Survey 2014/2015. The comments are now online and you can read the meeting minutes here.