New 2020-23 Novo Nordisk Foundation Project @EQUAL at DERG

The Development Economics Research Group (DERG) has with Professor Finn Tarp as grant recipient received 11.3 million DKK from the Novo Nordisk Foundation for a 4-year project entitled The Impact of Inequality on Growth, Human Development and Governance @EQUAL.

The @EQUAL project recognizes that inequality both impacts - and is impacted by - a wide range of economic and political factors. It focuses on one side of this dynamic relationship, but in so doing, will also offer insights relevant to how inequality is formed and reproduced, and the role of institutions therein.

“The purpose of this project is to explore inequality measures and understand behavioural response of vulnerable and poor people with respect to inequality. Inequality is a global challenge, but solutions target individuals. The results from this project will educate and enable funders and policy makers to better judge whether initiatives have the anticipated behaviour at the individual level to reach societal goals,” says Thomas Alslev Christensen, Head of Impact, Novo Nordisk Foundation.

The project combines cross-national and within-country analysis, exploiting both existing datasets and collecting new data through surveys and lab-in-the-field experiments in two countries (Mozambique and Vietnam). It will employ diverse quantitative techniques in the analysis of both observational and experimental data.

“We are most grateful to Novo Nordisk Foundation for engaging in this important project, which lies at the core concern of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of leaving no one behind in absolute poverty. We wish to contribute in a decisive way to bring empirical evidence and associated policy recommendations that help us to understand inequality beyond the Gini coefficient measure,” adds DERG’s coordinator, Professor Finn Tarp.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation approved the project in December 2019. The budget is for joint work between DERG, the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), the Central Institute of Economic Management (CIEM) in Vietnam, and the University Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) in Mozambique.

For more see the Project Page.