Blog

Report from The Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development

25 January 2016
Subhasish Dey
In December, I was lucky enough to attend one of the most prestigious conferences on development economics in the world –  the Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development organised by the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.
For this popular event 139 research papers were accepted from a submission of more than 1,000. There was a plenary session for each of the three days from Ariel Rubinstein of New York University, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki of Princeton and Asher Wolinksy of Northwestern University. I particularly enjoyed Ariel Rubenstein’s paper on ‘Game Theory – A typology of players: between instinctive and contemplative’.
This year my paper, which is co-authored with Professor Kunal Sen, was presented in the ‘empirical political economy’ session, along with two other papers. I gained really valuable experience in responding to the critical questions of more experienced and senior academics.
The conference was also an opportunity for me to present chapters of my PhD work and I got fantastic feedback from the audience, which later improved my paper.
The final day ended with a fascinating panel discussion on ‘Fiscal Federalism in India’. This included a discussion on the new revised role of the National Institution for Transforming India – NITI Aoyog, which recently replaced the Indian Planning Commission.
The wide range of research papers presented were primarily focused on India and the conference was a great opportunity for India researchers to connect with others in their field. Interaction between researchers gave an immense scope for future collaboration and for me this was the most exciting part of the event.