INVITATION TIL BROWN BAG LUNCH, MED PROFESSOR FINN TARP: THE TRIPLE CRISIS

UNU-WIDER to focus on the Triple Crisis
link to Working Paper No. 2010/01 The Triple Crisis and the Global Aid Architecture:

http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/working-papers/2010/en_GB/wp2010-01/


Finance, food and climate constitute a ‘triple crisis’, and are the focus of the new research programme of the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), a UN organization with a global network, based in Helsinki.

The world is going through a ‘Triple Crisis’. The impact of the financial crisis has been deep, its effects are not over, and recent signs of recovery remain tentative. At the same time, over one billion people face hunger, and any recovery in the global economy will once again push up food prices, leading to another spike that will hit the poor hard.

If global economic growth does recover, then emissions of greenhouse gases will accelerate once again, while cropland that previously grew food is now being turned over to biofuel crops, adding to the pressure on global food prices. These crises interact, they demand coordinated solutions, and they potentially threaten peace and stability. Hence our use of the term: the Triple Crisis.

As a United Nations institute, and the only UN research institute in economics located in the Nordic region, UNU-WIDER is giving priority to the Triple Crisis in its new programme, building on its longstanding and international reputation for foundational work in the areas of poverty, inequality and human development.
Climate-change is on everyone’s minds in the aftermath of COP-15. Of particular urgency is the need to understand the implications for development policy of the regional and country-level effects of climate change. To do that we will be working with the natural sciences to integrate the very best climate change research with our understanding of the economies and societies of poor countries—thereby providing better guidance to strategies and investments for sustainable growth and poverty reduction. Our initial focus in this work will be on sub-Saharan Africa as well as the Middle-East and North Africa. We will undertake a thorough analysis of food policy, in particular the responses to the huge and recent run-up in food prices, and propose a new global food architecture to protect the most vulnerable people, and meet the challenge of climate change.
Our work on finance, will focus not only on the regional impact of the crisis—including its implications for policy advice in development economics—but also on the large changes now underway in global financial flows, both official and private. Of great concern are the implications of the financial crisis for aid policy. Tighter aid budgets will demand sharper priorities to raise the effectiveness of aid while the climate and food crises will demand new modalities of financing and assistance that are yet to be developed.

This is a very demanding agenda. Each crisis is complex in its own right, the crises interact in ways that require innovative thinking, and policymakers face considerable uncertainty and very hard choices—that can be reduced, but certainly not eliminated, by cutting-edge research.

We believe that UNU-WIDER can make a significant contribution. Why? UNU-WIDER takes a global perspective drawing upon its extensive network of researchers from both the developing and developed worlds, ranging from Nobel Laureates to young early-career researchers. Our UN status has made us as much an institute of the South as one of the North. We have a track record in the range and depth of the Institute’s research that began 25 years ago when UNU-WIDER was established with the generous support of the Government of Finland. Over the years, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have continued to contribute resources and support, and UNU-WIDER has been able to draw upon the Nordic research community. These give us the capacity and the credibility to help the global community face the Triple Crisis. But we do not underestimate the difficulties of the challenge.

When UNU-WIDER began, the world was a very different place: the cold war was still underway, the Internet was unheard of, and climate change was on nobody’s agenda. The level of interaction in flows of trade, finance, as well as technology and people—that eventually became the present era of globalization—was still in its early stages.

Yet, many of the problems we see today were also central to the development debate of a quarter of a century ago: the need to end hunger and poverty and the need to manage economic crises and their social fallout were very much in the minds of the Institute’s founders and first researchers. And within UNU-WIDER’s first decade, issues of environment and development came to the fore, making UNU-WIDER one of the world’s first research institutes to seriously address what has become, today, the most serious problem facing humanity—how to ensure rising prosperity and rapidly falling poverty in the context of an increasingly fragile environment.

Finn Tarp, a Danish citizen, became Director of UNU-WIDER, Helsinki Finland on 1 September 2009. He is also Professor of Development Economics, University of Copenhagen.
This article is based on UNU-WIDER Working Paper No. 2010/01 ‘The Triple Crisis and the Global Aid Architecture’ by Tony Addison, Channing Arndt, and Finn Tarp, available at www.wider.unu.edu.