News

Two senior fellows, Prof. Luc Soete and Dr. Alessio Brown, recently featured in articles by the Financial Times and T-Systems magazine. Both wrote about the future world of work amid accelerating technological change — touching on the risks and rewards and the assumptions and disruptions. In a...

Eradicating poverty has been a global priority since the founding of the United Nations. Thanks to international efforts, the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world has fallen by more than half over the last three decades: 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015, according to...

As Ban Ki-Moon approaches the end of his mandate, consultations are under way to find a successor. A leading candidate for the post is Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO. During an event at Chatham House, a think tank in London, on 6 September 2016, she outlined what would be her main prioriti...

If impact is so difficult to attribute to the MDGs, how should we monitor the progress of the SDGs? In March 2016, the UN General Assembly adopted 230 indicators to cover the 17 SDGs and their accompanying 169 targets. But given the limitations of and discussion surrounding impact attribution, shoul...

Today is the first anniversary of the death of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned with half his family while trying to reach Europe in search of asylum. First and foremost, his death, like that of more than 5,000 other migrants who died crossing the Mediterranean last year, is a h...

Dr. Melissa Siegel has been appointed Professor of Migration Studies at Maastricht University from August 2016. She has also been appointed Co-Director of the Maastricht Center for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE) from 1 September 2016. She joins Professors Gerard-Rene de Groot and ...

My ‘mygration’ story is rooted in the politics of a fractured subcontinent; politics that are emblematic of the region. My maternal grandfather moved from Delhi to East Pakistan during partition in 1947, with a desire to build a new life in a new nation. But in 1971 Pakistan was split in two. My gra...

The GPAC² PhD programme, designed for working professionals, brings us not only interesting PhD fellows but also increases our academic network thanks to external supervisors. One of our associated researchers, Prof. Louis Volante, initially came in as supervisor to Dr. Derek Copp, but is now contri...

Ana Cristina Calderon Ramirez, a PhD Fellow on our GPAC² programme, has beaten around 100 other researchers to win Best Paper Award at the International Public Procurement Conference 7 (IPPC7). The paper, ‘Elements of public procurement reform and their effect on the public sector in Latin Ame...

“I was born in Uganda, I am Rwandan, but I grew up in South Africa.” This is my standard response to the question “Where are you from?” – because I genuinely feel like I am from all three countries....

Dr. Özge Bilgili, Theme Leader for Integration, Social Cohesion and Transnationalism Research, has been selected for the OECD’s Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship for 2017. During the project period at the Directorate for Education and Skills in Paris, she will focus on migrant children’s educational ac...

As we approach the first anniversary of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), on 25 September 2016, at least one thing is clear: nothing will be achieved without a joined-up approach and an integrated strategy. In practice, this means that the UN’s silos will need to start talking the same la...

This year, we stayed in our own new Sphinxkwartier neighbourhood to celebrate the closing ceremony of our Master’s programme in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP). The Muziekgieterij, the Maastricht pop concert hall located a few minutes down the Boschstraat in the renovated Timmerfabri...

The annual European Innovation Scoreboard, co-authored by Hugo Hollanders, Nordine Es-Sadki and Minna Kanerva, provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU Member States, other European countries, and regional neighbours. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national i...

Around 168 million children worldwide are involved in child labour, according to recent ILO estimates. More than half of them, 85 million, are doing hazardous work. These numbers have fallen in recent years, but trends vary across regions, countries and sectors and the figures remain alarmingly high...

Alumnus and affiliated researcher Dr. Richard Bluhm has won this year’s Prize for Excellence in Applied Development Research from the German Economic Association (VfS). He was awarded first prize in the Young Researcher category for his doctoral thesis on ‘Growth Dynamics and Development. Essa...

When Isaac Attie arrived in Bolivia in 1917, he brought all his worldly belongings in a single suitcase. He had travelled to Latin America in search of a safer and better life: far from the conflict and turmoil of Europe and the Middle East....

“Almost three quarters (73%) of 18 to 24-year-olds said they had voted to stay in the EU, compared with 62% of 25 to 34s and 52% of 35 to 44s,” noted a BBC article after last week’s referendum. But “support for Brexit formed a majority among every other age category and grew ...

Today is B-Day, when British voters decide whether to leave or stay in the European Union. For anyone fond of buzzwords the choice is simple: Brexit or Bremain? Yet the data feeding into the referendum are more complex and, as shown time and again, woefully open to manipulation. One of the main argu...

Clinical trials are an essential part of developing new drugs — but how can we limit or prevent ethical violations? How can we ensure effective governance, checks and balances, amid a proliferation of stakeholders? Part-time PhD fellow Farida Lada gives the background on her research and journ...