What Can Economics Tell Us about Development?

Myron Scholes
Global Markets Forum

September 27, 2010, 5:30–7 p.m, Gleacher Center

Professor Robin Burgess is a professor of economics at the London School of Economics and founder and academic director of the International Growth Centre, which promotes sustainable growth in developing countries by providing demand-led policy advice based on frontier research.

How the economic lives of citizens living in the world’s poorest countries can be improved is one of the big questions facing humanity today. Burgess talked about how economics can be used to study and influence the development process, how this has changed over time, and whether economics is providing meaningful responses to the growth and development challenges being thrown up across the globe.

This event was part of the Initiative on Global Markets and is generously sponsored by Myron Scholes.

Speaker Profiles


Robin Burgess is a professor of economics and founder and academic director of the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics. The International Growth Centre, in which Chicago Booth’s IGM is a partner, is a new initiative that promotes sustainable growth in developing countries by providing demand-led policy advice based on frontier research.

Professor Burgess’s areas of research interest include development economics, public economics, political economy, labor economics, and environmental economics. He has published on a variety of topics—natural disasters, mass media, rural banks, land reform, labor regulation, industrial policy, taxation, poverty, and growth. He was brought up in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, the United States, the Philippines, and Italy, where his father worked as a doctor and his mother as a child nutritionist. He received a BS in biological sciences from Edinburgh University, an MS in economics from the LSE, and a PhD in economics from Oxford University.

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