The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) dedicates this year’s Annual Lecture to the 75th anniversary of the United Nations. This lecture will discuss whether the UN can reinvent itself or whether it will sink into irrelevance.
The lecturer, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, knows the UN intimately, as he has held several top-level positions in the UN family and served as Deputy Secretary‐General of the UN under Kofi Annan. Lord Malloch-Brown’s lecture will be followed by comments from Natalie Samarasinghe, Chief of Strategy for UN75, and a Q&A session.
As this year’s Annual Lecture will be held online, it will be easily accessible to an interested audience from around the world.
Last year’s WIDER Annual Lecture at The Graduate Institute
The WIDER Annual Lecture is one of UNU-WIDER’s flagship events. The first lecture was given by Douglas C. North in 1997. Since then, the lecture has been delivered by a prestigious line of scholars and political actors, four of whom are Nobel Laureates. The lecture is open to the public and is usually given by an eminent scholar or policymaker who has made a significant contribution to the field of development economics.
Last year’s WIDER Annual Lecture was hosted at The Graduate Institute by its Centre for Finance and Development. It was given by Santiago Levy, an economist, former Deputy Finance Minister and General Director of the Mexican Social Security Institute, and main architect of Progresa/Oportunidades – Mexico’s incentive-based health, nutrition and education program for the poor.
Santiago Levy’s lecture was entitled Informality – addressing the Achilles heel of social protection in Latin America and discussed the challenges of social protection in economies with large informal sectors, such as in Latin America. Santiago Levy’s WIDER Annual Lecture 2019 attracted a great number of interested academics, students, and professionals into The Graduate Institute’s Auditorium Ivan Pictet.