Kunal Sen presenting at Centre for Development and the Environment

Kunal Sen gives a presentation on 7 October 2021 at 2.15-4.15pm at the Centre for Development and the Environemnt, University of Oslo. 

The topic is his presentation is "How to Get Inclusive Growth Started in Fragile Contexts?". His talk is based on a recent UNU-WIDER publication Deals and development in fragile and conflict-affected states, under the research project How do effective states emerge?

The event is hosted by the Oslo SDG Initiative, a hub for education, research, outreach and dissemination related to the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.

See more details about the event here at the organiser's website.

Abstract

As foreign aid becomes increasingly concentrated on the most vexing cases of fragile and conflict-affected states (FCAS), policy-oriented research is needed to respond to the challenge of how to address political economy dynamics while constructing economic growth and private sector development strategies in FCAS economies. Economic growth, depending where and how it accrues, can affect the probability of lasting peace by influencing the political dynamics of factional competition over the state. In this lecture, I offer a framework – the Deals and Development framework - built to understand when developing countries are able to initiate periods of rapid growth and why so few of these countries have been able to sustain growth over decades. Economic growth for most developing countries is not a linear process. Growth instead proceeds in booms and busts, yet most frameworks for thinking about economic growth are built on the faulty assumption that a country's economic performance is largely stable. Through a political economy analysis of business-government relations, Deals and Development explains how growth episodes emerge and when growth, once ignited, is maintained for a sustained period.  We apply the framework to three FCAS countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Offering a lens through which to analyse complex scenarios and unwieldy amounts of information, the framework provides actionable levers of intervention to bring around reform and improve a country's chance at achieving transformative economic growth.