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My research was about a set of public policies to support the semiconductor industry in Brazil. These policies started to be designed in the early 2000s, when it was identified that developing a semiconductor industry in the country would foster innovation in the electronics industry. The latter was...

Over the course of the year, we rolled out the SMART Choices and SMART Tools education project — which is finally available now via the Blackboard Open Education portal. SMART Choices is a collection of six online courses based on our MPP academic tracks: a set of courses designed to help stud...

A joint post by Prof. Shyama V. Ramani and Dr. Sanae Okamoto ‘The road to hell,’ goes the age-old proverb ‘is paved with good intentions’. In the 21st century, there can be no clearer example of this than the millions of underused or abandoned toilets in the developing world built for Sustainable De...

Sofia Luz Castaneda was the daughter of a wealthy family in Guatemala, a country in Central America. Her father was a farmer, who employed many men to cultivate his lands. However, one day, one of her father’s employees caught her eye – Samuel Bonilla. Sofia and Samuel fell in love, yet their union ...

My research addresses the problem of deforestation and forest preservation in Brazil. This country has the largest stretch of tropical forest in the world. Surprisingly, and this is good news for once, Brazil has reduced yearly deforestation levels dramatically over the last decade. Since the Rio Co...

Labour market experts Inge Hooijen and Julia Reinold researched the mobility intentions and behaviour of graduates in the Meuse–Rhine Euroregion – the borderlands of Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands – and found that big life decisions are down to more than an attractive labour market. “Obviously...

A UN Day 2018 message from UNU Rector and UN Under-Secretary-General David M. Malone. ••• The United Nations of 2018 exists in a world that is more interconnected than ever before. Countries are no longer insulated from the setbacks and challenges of other nations, and all profit in some way from ea...

I found out about the UNU-MERIT PhD programme through an online scholarship subscription. Initially, I was a bit surprised that governance and economics could be combined to form a single PhD programme – but then I saw how the two tracks work side-by-side in a complementary way....

“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not the winning but the taking part.” So goes the famous saying by Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympic Games. But does the same apply for competitive research grants? UNU-MERIT’s Fabiana Visentin joins co-authors Charles Ayoubi an...

Migration across the Mediterranean is often portrayed as the new societal and political ‘crisis’ of our time; EU nations are struggling to agree over a few rescue boats, while narratives of “invasion” and “call-effect ” have become part of the political discourse. Yet, migration across the Mediterra...

In line with UN commitments ‘to leave no one behind’, social protection is a strategic approach for cutting poverty and improving resilience, based on strengthening the links between humanitarian aid and development. Extending coordinated social protection provisions to refugees could be the bridge ...

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has appointed Lieutenant General Dennis Gyllensporre of Sweden as Force Commander of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). Lieutenant General Gyllensporre holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Maastricht University, gaine...

In our third and final report from the DEIP Innovation Workshop in Morocco, September 2018, we spoke with Omar Elyoussoufi Attou, Head of Innovation at the Moroccan Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Executive Training. … How can this DEIP workshop help national governments ...

In this second report from our DEIP Innovation Workshop in Morocco, September 2018, we caught up with Dr. Mafini Dosso, an Ivorian national who works for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Seville, Spain. … We spoke about the pyramid of science communications: about servi...

As a co-author, the main point to stress is the large innovation divide between low- and high-income countries. Within Africa there are very large disparities – countries across the continent are very different – but there are some similarities. For example, there are still many challenges on the in...

A joint post by Prof. Carlo Pietrobelli and Beatriz Calzada. Since the mid-1990s, Latin American countries have become an attractive destination for foreign mining investment — largely thanks to established regulatory frameworks that provide legal stability and security of mining ownership, as...

For over a decade, we’ve been training Asian professionals on the latest developments in social protection. Led by the Universities of Heidelberg, Germany and Hanoi, Vietnam, the International Social Protection Studies Programme also has a Maastricht-based module: covering policy management, monitor...

Students on our Master of Science in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) were asked to write a critical opinion about a dispute resolution mechanism — and how it might protect both human rights and development. Below are two essays on transitional justice, covering a range of critical is...

Midsummer, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) published the “E-Governance – A powerful tool toward resilient, inclusive and sustainable disaster risk management”. You contributed as an author on e-resilience and e-government. Can you please elaborate what the survey and publicat...

In light of the World Humanitarian Day last Sunday, August 19, this post argues for the need to revisit humanitarian aid and place it alongside social protection. Recognising that over 140 million people relied on humanitarian aid across 37 countries in 2017, there is an urgent need to take up the d...