Date: Friday, October 18, 2013
Time: 12:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Location: Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West
Focus: This year’s LIDS Symposium, entitled “Trade and Entrepreneurship: Linking Local Growth to Global Markets,” aims to highlight the legal, political, and economic barriers facing new businesses and aspiring exporters in developing countries. The symposium begins with the underlying notion that independent and sustainable development cannot occur without the emergence of successful, exportable domestic industries. While approaches such as microfinance gained traction in the past decade, efforts to grow subsistence-level producers and informal businesses into more efficient medium-sized enterprises in developing countries have remained frustratingly slow. Through the rich experience of the speakers, the 2013 LIDS symposium aims to exchange valuable lessons from NGOs, government, academia, and groundbreaking fieldwork in the search for solutions that to lead the way forward in this critical area of development.
Keynote Speaker: Abhijit Banerjee
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan and remains one of the directors of the lab. In 2009 J-PAL won the BBVA Foundation “Frontier of Knowledge” award in the development cooperation category. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He received the Infosys Prize 2009 in Social Sciences and Economics. In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory. He is the author of a large number of articles and three books, including Poor Economics (www.pooreconomics.com) which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. He is the editor of a fourth book, and finished his first documentary film, “The Name of the Disease” in 2006. Most recently, Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
List of Speakers and Moderators:
Austin Choi: Kiva’s General Counsel
C. Don Johnson: Director of the Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy at Georgia Law
Katrin Kuhlmann: President, New Markets Lab, President, TransFarm Africa
Terra Lawson-Remer: Assistant Professor of International Affairs and Economics at The New School and Fellow for Civil Society, Markets & Democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations
Joost Pauwelyn: Professor of International Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland
David Satterthwaite: Deputy Director, Private Sector Development, Oxfam America
Simon Winter: TechnoServe’s Senior Vice President of Development
Mark Wu: Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Click here for detailed schedule of events and more information about speakers.