Project Aims and Funding 2015 to 2018
Our four-year project creates an international network for graduate and postgraduate work among nine participating universities in developing countries/emerging markets and Germany. Its aim is to provide a common framework for learning from best practices in graduate and post-graduate teaching, provide graduate students with exposure to other countries’ methods for teaching economics (both with a North-South and a South-South dimension) and help students, junior and senior researchers develop a perspective within “Comparative Economic Development Studies.”
The project started in 2015 creates a network for graduate and postgraduate work on “Comparative Economic Development Studies” among the following universities: University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil; Central University of Finance & Economics, Beijing, China; Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; University of Mauritius, Mauritius; University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa), HTW Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin.
The thematic focus of the project lies on “Strategies for Economic Development in Emerging Market Economies and Their Global Impact,” and ties into the recent debate on the appropriate role of states and markets. The network participants are convinced that new findings on this topic can best be achieved from comparative studies on specific country experiences which take into account the institutional framework present in the countries concerned. At the moment, comparative research with the inclusion of a number of universities from emerging markets and developing countries is rather rare, even though the potential for South-South learning on this issue is huge. The project is targeted towards building a network for just such research and training young scholars in the appropriate techniques.
The project is comprised of different elements as annual research workshops, lecturer and young researcher exchanges, virtual workshops and lecture series.
The workshops have taken place at the University of Campinas in Brazil (in Sept. 2015), at the East China Normal University in Shanghai (in Dec. 2016; ), at the Jawaharlal University in New Delhi (Dec. 2017) and at the University of Pretoria (in Sept. 2018). During the workshops PhD students from participating universities are selected to receive methodological research training on “Comparative Economic Development Studies”, including development of PhD proposals, econometrics for low-quality data, case study methodology, and academic writing for policy consulting purposes. Furthermore the students will be jointly trained by professors from the participating institutions on topics like development strategies, trade policies, monetary policy, financial stability, financial development, international capital flows and the role of income distribution.
Additionally to the students that participate at the workshops it’s the aim to reach out a larger number of students from partner universities through teaching exchanges, virtual lecture series and cross-continent, virtual PhD workshops.
