Workshop on Social Dynamics and the Microeconomics of Poverty
March 30 April 1, 2005
Rockefeller Foundation Conference Center
Bellagio, Italy
In recent years there has been an explosion of research enumerating various ways in which individualsidentities or membership in different sorts of groups or networks affects microeconomic behavior. The literatures on social capital, on the diffusion of information and technologies, on social insurance and reciprocity arrangements, on contract enforcement, on microfinance, on social exclusion, and on a variety of other topics in development economics and the social sciences more broadly suggest that ones social context matters to productivity and welfare. However, individuals join or face exclusion from groups in part because of the expected effects of membership and in part because of their socio-cultural identities, which co-evolve with group membership. The non-randomness of individualsassignment to groups makes inference from much of the published literature problematic. Therefore, researchers are beginning to take more seriously the social dynamics that underpin associational life and identity.
This conference aims to push the research frontier to the next level, to assemble a critical mass of rigorous empirical research that explores more carefully how and why associational patterns matter to the economics of poverty and development. More precisely, we have invited a small, select group of leading researchers who might be able to offer new empirical results on how and why people form into groups and the consequences of these often-endogenous associational patterns for productivity and welfare. We have an agreement with the Journal of Development Economics to publish a special issue, to be co-edited by the conference co-organizers (Chris Barrett, Andrew Foster and Esther Duflo), from the conference papers, subject to usual peer review requirements.
We also wish to begin a substantive dialogue around strategies to incorporate theories and methods of social economics economics that takes individualscultural, moral and social milieu seriously into undergraduate and graduate economics and agricultural economics curricula and into policy research and outreach, including at universities in developing countries in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America. The conference will therefore include leading scholars from key institutions of higher education in the developing world and daily panel discussions of curricular and policy research and outreach issues.
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For more information, please contact:
Christopher B. Barrett, Professor
Department of Applied Economics and Management
Cornell University, 315 Warren Hall, Ithaca,
NY 14853-7801
Email: cbb2@cornell.edu,
Telephone: 607-255-4489, Fax: 607-255-9984
