Staff Reporter
The Lahore School of Economics (LSE) in partnership with International Growth Centre hosted its Third International Conference on Applied Development Economics.
Similar to the first two editions of the conference in 2018 and 2019 which were a great success, the three days event this year, was once again devoted to bringing together policy makers, renowned researchers, academics and practitioners from within Pakistan and abroad to discuss relevant themes for developing countries such as, firm & entrepreneurship, labor, gender, poverty and social protection, health, education, and governance and institutional capacity.
The conference started off with welcome remarks by Dr Shahid Amjad Chaudhry (Rector, Lahore School of Economics). He extended a warm welcome to a distinguished and impressive galaxy of academics, researchers, and other honorable guests.
He highlighted that that this international conference will shed light on the state of economic stability in developing countries especially under the circumstances of Covid, poverty, underdevelopment, and civil war which is ending in Afghanistan.
The plenary address was delivered by Christopher Woodruff (University of Oxford) who discussed the impact of loans and grants on different microenterprises.
He evaluated whether the donor should give grants or make loans given the aim is to generate growth. The idea he reflected is that with loans, the enterprise keeps only the returns in excess of principal and interest payments.
The first session of the conference focused on firms and entrepreneurship. The moderator for the session was Hamna Ahmed (Lahore School of Economics).
The session was initiated by Muhammad Meki (University of Oxford) with his paper (written jointly with Francesco Cordaro, Marcel Fafchamps, Colin Mayer, Simon Quinn and Kate Roll) comparing a traditional debt contract to three alternatives: a novel equity-like financing contract; a hybrid debt-equity contract; and an index insurance financing contract.
The second paper was presented by Muhammad Haseeb (University of Geneva) on Environmental regulation and firm size (coauthored with Namrata Kala and James Fenske).The study estimates the impact of a large change in environmental policy in India in 2016, which reduced the burden of environmental regulation for certain sectors.
The second session of the conference was on Labour. The session was moderated by Muhammad Meki (University of Oxford). Lukas Hensel (University of Oxford) presented the first paper of the session (jointly written with Tsegay Gebrekidan Tekleselassie and Marc Witte).
