News
Prof. Kattel and Prof. Kregel at the Ford Foundation & MINDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro 7-9 November
Prof. Rainer Kattel and Professor Jan Kregel from the Department of Public Administration are participating at the high-level conference 'New Economic Thinking, Teaching and Policy Perspectives: A Brazilian Perspective within a Global Dialogue' organized by Ford Foundation and MINDS (Multidisciplinary Institute for Development and Strategies) in Rio de Janeiro from 7-9 November.
The conference takes place at the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), one of the largest development banks in the world.
Prof. Kattel gives a presentation on “The return of the state? The neoliberal legacies and challenges in catching up economies” and acts as the main discussant in the session 'International Regulatory Reforms so Far: What’s in place and what’s missing?'.
Prof. Kregel gives two presentations - 'Strategies for Weathering the Crisis: Decoupling or Strategic Hedging?' and 'Welcoming the Era of Post-American Economic Thinking: Toward a Global Anthropology of Economics' - and also acts as the main discussant in the session 'Forging New Thinking: Shaping Financial Institutions for Innovation and Development'.
Background of the conference:
The Ford Foundation is developing a strategic initiative, springing from its Reforming Global Financial Governance portfolio, whose goal is to extract lessons from the BICS countries both in terms of weathering the financial crisis and in crafting institutions to support effective and democratic financial governance and sustain development, employment, and poverty reduction. The founding event for this initiative will be a conference, in Rio de Janeiro, on New Economic Thinking, Teaching and Policy Perspectives - A Brazilian Perspective within a Global Dialogue. The conference’s goal is to combine “thinking outside the box” with “looking outside the box” in the sense of developing new analytical frameworks, but also exploring countries, policies, policy makers and teaching programs outside the US-EU axis, with whom we would seek engagement in order to help us achieve these goals.
This is an important event which will help to address the continuing impact of the financial-turned-fiscal crisis and to highlight the importance of the BICS countries, plus some other G20 members, in weathering it and pushing for a new “policy and institutional compact”. The Ford Foundation, an organization engaged with advancing progressive thinking, social justice and democratic governance, sees the crisis as a unique opportunity to reframe the thinking and the narrative, especially in economics, that contributed to the current state of affairs. The conference aims to contribute to broaden the international dialogue on the three fronts outlined above: new thinking, teaching experiences and designing new curricula, as well as crafting and implementing more effective and socially responsible policy mixes.
