Last updated on June 25, 2019
Earlier this year I was invited by University of Copenhagen professor–and erstwhile UNU-WIDER–director Finn Tarp to deliver one of two keynote addresses at last week’s Nordic Conference on Development Economics.
After proposing a few topics to Finn, we settled on a talk titled “Value Chains: Toward a Marriage of Development and Industrial Organization?”
I have seen many keynotes in my career. The worst kind of keynote is when the speaker presents his or her paper du jour; for me, that is a lazy approach, because if people wanted to hear about a single paper, they would have invited you over for a seminar. So for me, the best kind of keynote is when the speaker presents his or her thoughts about a given topic.
So in the spirit of the best keynotes I have seen, my keynote was about the promise I see in the prospective marriage of the two fields, informed by my work on agricultural value chains. The talk ends with what is perhaps my #1 piece of advice to graduate students.
You can find my slides for this talk here. The other keynote–on the economics of hope–was given by my grad-school office mate Travis Lybbert, whose slides are here, and who also gave a broad overview-type talk.