Promoting Global Health and Fighting Poverty

Hybride-Event with Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer, 29 September 2021

How can we pro­mote health and al­le­vi­ate pover­ty in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries? De­vel­op­ment econ­o­mist and No­bel lau­re­ate Michael Kre­mer pro­vides a so­lu­tion to ob­tain re­li­able an­swers for this ques­tion. It in­volves di­vid­ing the is­sue into small­er, more man­age­able ques­tions – an ex­per­i­men­tal ap­proach char­ac­ter­ized by rig­or­ous test­ing. He talked about his work in a keynote in Zurich, or­ga­nized by the De­part­ment of Eco­nom­ics and the Ex­cel­lence Foun­da­tion Zurich.

In his keynote, Kre­mer drew par­al­lels be­tween his work and in­no­va­tion process­es from the busi­ness world, such as new prod­uct launch­es which of­ten in­volve A/B-test­ing. He showed how de­vel­op­ment aid can be made more ef­fec­tive if mea­sures are rig­or­ous­ly test­ed. Equal­ly im­por­tant for him is the co­op­er­a­tion with lo­cal au­thor­i­ties and in­sti­tu­tions, he said. This is of­ten seen as an ob­sta­cle, but ac­cord­ing to Kre­mer this is a mis­con­cep­tion. Af­ter all, co­or­di­nat­ing and deal­ing with the lo­cal peo­ple and con­di­tions of­fers an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary per­spec­tive, which is very valu­able for re­search.

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Media coverage

For econ­o­mist Michael Kre­mer, stock­pil­ing ca­pac­i­ty is the key to fight­ing a pan­dem­ic. Switzer­land is ide­al­ly suit­ed for this, he says in an in­ter­view with NZZ. How­ev­er, to en­sure that more Coro­na vac­cines be­come avail­able quick­ly, he pro­pos­es a low­er dosage. This would prob­a­bly also re­duce vac­ci­na­tion skep­ti­cism, he spec­u­lates.

Read the ar­ti­cle (in Ger­man)