Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference

September 28-30, 2001

The Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference continues to be a major forum for the discussion of development issues. The Institute served as host to the Fall 2001 Conference on September 28-30 at Boston University. One hundred and thirty-two papers were presented during this three day event covering topics including Formal and Informal Credit, Labor, Social Networks, Inequality, Microcredit, Health, Credit and Inequality, Governance and Corruption, Social Capital, Risk and Sharing, Agriculture, Intrahousehold Allocations, Finance and Development, Poverty, Industrial Organization, Education, Financial Institutions and Development, Political Economy, Development Macroeconomics, Trade Liberalization, Growth and Capital, Transfers and Welfare, International Issues, Child Labor, Environmental Economics, Child Labor and Demography.

Participants from the five core members of the consortium, Harvard, Yale, Williams, BU, and Cornell were joined by economists from both academic and research organizations around the world. Representatives from the World Bank, IMF, universities across the US and Canada as well as from Sweden, England, Hong Kong and other countries, participated both as presenters and discussants.

2002 Rosenstein-Rodan Prize Winner Announced

The Institute for Economic Development awarded the 2002 Rosenstein-Rodan Prize to Haldun Evrenk for his paper Are Honest Citizens to Blame for Corruption? An Exercise in Political Economy of Tax Evasion.

The prize, in memory of Professor Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, is awarded annually to graduate students in economics submitting the best research paper in the field of development economics. The abstract for this paper follows:

This paper is about public support for anti-corruption reforms. The form of corruption we consider is tax evasion, in a country where taxes are commonly evaded. We analyze the relation between the fraction of evaders and the support for anti-corruption reform. We find that in societies where all citizens have the opportunity and willingness to evade, anti-corruption reforms always win public support. However, reforms may not receive enough support in societies where a majority of citizens do not or cannot evade and a minority do evade.