GRP Conferences

Two conferences have been held by the Global Research Project (GRP) so far. The first conference was in Cairo, Egypt and the second in Prague, Czhek Republic.

Cairo
The Cairo Workshop was the first in the series of meets on Explaining Growth: A Global Research Project. It was held on October 28-29, 1999 at the Cairo Marriott Hotel, Egypt.

The participants, apart from the researchers and regional network heads, included Yousef Boutros Ghali, Minister of Economy, Egypt; Medhat Hassanain, Minister of Finance, Egypt; Lyn Squire, World Bank and Heba Handoussa, Managing Director, Economic Research Forum (ERF). Samir Makdisi, Chairman of the Board, ERF, EGYPT; opened the plenary session.

The working sessions were organised according to themes conducted in parallel sessions. Day one was devoted to the six working sessions organised by the region. Parallel sessions were held on four themes: Sources of Growth, Markets and Growth, Microeconomics of Growth and Political Economy of Growth where researchers from different research institutes presented their research findings. Day two was organised into six working sessions by region in order to have more focussed debate.

The session on South Asia was attended by Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Faisal Bari, Binayak Sen, Ajit Ranade, Rehana Siddiqui, Saman Kelegama, Kirirt Parikh, Suresh Tendulkar and Isher Judge Ahluwalia.

John Williamson, Institute for International Economics chaired the session on South Asia.

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Prague
The second workshop on Explaining Growth for the authors of the GRP was held in Prague on June 10-11, 2000. The meeting, convened in cooperation with the International Economics Association, aimed to provide the authors with an opportunity for cross regional dialogue and feedback from top international experts. Nobel laureate Robert Solow presented the keynote speech.

Most of the workshop was divided into smaller groups along the lines of the thematic papers. In the final working session, the participants discussed the common issues among the papers, notable omissions in the papers and directions for the next stage of the Global Research Project country studies.

See a summary of the Prague meeting (pdf)

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