Global Climate Change Week (GCCW) has published an open letter urging world leaders to ratify, implement, and strengthen the measures of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. We call on all our supporters to sign the letter and help put pressure on leaders to take greater action.

Global Climate Change Week is an initiative led by ASAP board member Keith Horton. It aims to encourage academic communities – including academics, students, and professional staff at universities – in all disciplines and countries to engage with each other, their communities, and policy makers on climate change action and solutions.

Submission Deadline: August 29, 2016

ASAP, Global Financial Integrity and the Yale Global Justice Program are soliciting original essays of ca. 7,000 to 9,000 words on the non-revenue impact of curbing illicit financial flows for the third annual Amartya Sen Prize.

Poor populations are hurt when rich individuals and multinational corporations surreptitiously shift trillions of dollars in wealth and profits out of less developed countries. One harm arises from the loss of tax revenues incurred by their governments. By concealing their profits or wealth, MNCs and individuals evade taxes on profits, dividends, interest and/or capital gains—taxes that could fund social spending or tax reductions for ordinary citizens.

This year\’s submissions are to focus on the other harm from illicit financial outflows: the loss of capital to a poor country\’s economy, which may well substantially exceed the revenue loss. Such capital loss occurs when, often to dodge taxes or tariffs, individuals and companies of all sizes move wealth and profits offshore illicitly, e.g. through trade misinvoicing. Authors might choose to discuss the potential economic impact of reducing such capital losses: the impact on savings, investment, trade, interest rates, consumption, employment, economic growth, and/or culture and the arts, for example. In this context, it would be interesting to explore what policies domestic and international authorities might adopt in order to discourage the export of private sector capital and to amplify the beneficial effects of curbing illicit financial outflows. The latter exploration raises the partly moral question of how to value these effects from the standpoint of a less developed country\’s poor majority.

Authors might also tackle the challenge of estimating the magnitude of such capital losses. Is some of the capital now illicitly removed brought back openly as new investment? Would some of the capital now illicitly removed be exported anyway, openly, even if there were no opportunity to shift it out in tax-dodging ways? Would some of the MNCs now illicitly shifting profits out have refrained from entering the country in the first place without the prospect of tax-dodging profits, and would such failures to enter be counterproductive to the interests of the developing countries?

The above lines of thought are meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. We hope for a creative diversity of submissions that provide a rich and well-grounded picture of what our world could look like—especially from the perspective of the poor — if illicit financial outflows from the less developed countries could be substantially curtailed.

The best entries will be presented at an international conference in the fall of 2016 at Yale University and subsequently published in a special issue of a prominent journal. In addition, at least two of the winning essays will receive a monetary award: a first prize of $5,000 and a second prize of $3,000. 

Please email your entry to ian@academicsstand.org by Monday, August 29 at 5pm ET. We ask that entries be anonymized to facilitate blind refereeing. Winners will be selected by an expert jury, whose decisions are final.

Submission Deadline: August 31, 2015

The Yale Global Justice Program, Global Financial Integrity, and Academics Stand Against Poverty invite submissions of original essays on illicit financial flows to the second annual Amartya Sen Prize Competition. Prizes are named in honor of Amartya Sen, whose work has shown how the rigor of economic thinking can be brought to bear on normative and practical questions of great human significance.

Illicit financial flows are international movements of funds that have been illegally earned or are being illegally transferred or utilized. Such flows may involve proceeds of corruption or other crimes – or be associated with efforts to evade corporate or individual taxation. According to the NGO Global Financial Integrity, developing countries are especially harshly affected by illicit financial outflows, losing some $6.6 trillion in the decade ending in 2012 and about $1 trillion annually more recently.

The 2015 Amartya Sen Prize Competition is soliciting original essays of ca. 7,000 to 9,000 words on the intelligent use of incentives toward curtailing corporations\’ use of tax evasion and avoidance, abusive transfer pricing and all forms of illicit financial flows. Many have been upset by media reports about how corporations dodge taxes around the world. What can we as consumers and investors do toward curtailing such practices? Consumers can direct purchases away from offending firms. Investors can use the voting rights their shares confer to influence the way corporations manage their affairs, and they can also influence firms by divesting themselves of shares and by shunning certain investments. And people related to large investors (e.g., students at a well-endowed university, participants in a large pension fund) can try to nudge that investor toward exerting more and better influence on corporations.

Efforts by consumers and investors to improve corporate behavior will be much more effective if they are concerted, that is, if consumers and investors reward and penalize the same sorts of behaviors. Such concerted action presupposes objective and transparent standards for assessing corporate behavior as the basis on which consumers and investors can then reward and penalize. Essays will be judged by their contribution toward achieving such effective concerted action. Essays might be predominantly normative, working out, perhaps, what the appropriate standards for assessing corporate behavior should be; they might be predominantly empirical, examining for example how similar efforts have fared in the past; or they might be predominantly practical, experimentally exploring what sorts of incentives are most likely to have the desired effects. Of course, essays might combine normative, empirical and practical elements.

The best entries are to be presented at an international conference at Yale University in the fall of 2015 and are subsequently to be published as a special issue of a prominent journal. (Last year\’s winners are forthcoming in the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities.) In addition, at least two of the winning essays will be graced with a monetary award: a first prize of $5,000 and a second prize of $3,000. Professor Sen joined us for last year\’s award ceremony and hopes to do so again this year.

Entries should be e-mailed to Chelsea Papa at chelsea@academicsstand.org under the subject line \”Amartya Sen Prize Contest Submission\” and must reach her by August 31, 2015. We ask that entries be anonymized to facilitate blind refereeing. Quality judgments will be made by an expert jury, whose decisions are final.

The new deadline for submission of proposals for papers on absolute poverty in Europe has been extended to March 13.

Two cross-cutting debates about development are preoccupying officials, academics and civil society groups in the middle of this decade. One concerns the evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), due to expire at the end of 2015. Some describe them as the most successful poverty eradication effort ever, others as a fraud or abysmal failure. The other debate is about the formulation of the MDGs’ successors, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 and meant to guide development efforts until 2030. What goals, targets and indicators should be included in the final document? Who should be involved in the drafting process and how?

Special Issue of Symposion: The Sustainable Development Goals

Guest Editors:
Stefan Cibian (Visiting Professor, Department of Political Science, Babes-Bolyai University),
Ana-Maria Lebada (Adviser on Post-2015 Agenda, Permanent Mission of Romania to the United Nations), Thomas Pogge (Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University)

Two cross-cutting debates about development are preoccupying officials, academics and civil society groups in the middle of this decade. One concerns the evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), due to expire at the end of 2015. Some describe them as the most successful poverty eradication effort ever, others as a fraud or abysmal failure. The other debate is about the formulation of the MDGs\’ successors, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 and meant to guide development efforts until 2030. What goals, targets and indicators should be included in the final document? Who should be involved in the drafting process and how?

Symposion is inviting contributions that enrich the ongoing debates on the SDGs and related concepts, theories, policies, methodologies and practice. This special issue aims to illuminate the conceptual, institutional, systemic and procedural frameworks underpinning the new goals. The number of SDGs proposed, 17, constitutes a substantial increase from the 8 MDGs and will pose a serious challenge to the international community. At the same time, the expansion of areas covered by the proposed SDGs invites critical reflection. The participation of a wide web of local, national, and international organizations, both in the implementation of the MDGs and in the preparatory process of the SDGs, reflects a rich fabric of stakeholders and of policy choices and practices. How responsive is the process through which the SDGs are shaped to the current global realities, to the local realities of developing countries and to the experience with the MDGs? What are the structural implications of adopting such goals and what are the institutional preconditions for achieving them? What would an effective monitoring and accountability mechanism for the SDGs look like? How do the SDGs differ from the MDGs, and what impact might these differences have? How do the SDGs fit into the broader UN post-2015 development agenda? What are the major challenges to their implementation? We welcome interdisciplinary work addressing these and related questions.

Paper Requirements and Deadline

For this special issue, the desired essay length is 8,000 words, including footnotes and references. The editors reserve the right to ask the authors to shorten their texts when necessary. All submitted articles must have a short abstract not exceeding 200 words and 3 to 6 keywords. Authors are asked to compile their manuscripts in the following order: title, abstract, keywords, main text, appendices (if any), references. All manuscripts submitted for the special issue should be in English. More details are available here.

Please submit your manuscripts electronically by the 1st of June 2015 to symposion.journal@yahoo.com. Authors will receive an e-mail confirming the submission. All subsequent correspondence with the authors will be by e-mail. When a paper is co-authored, one author should be identified as the corresponding author.

Academics Stand Against Poverty, Global Financial Integrity, and the Yale Global Justice Program invite submissions of original essays on illicit financial flows to the first annual Amartya Sen Prize Contest. All prizes are named in honor of Amartya Sen, whose work has shown how the rigor of economic thinking can be brought to bear on normative and practical questions of great human significance.

Illicit financial flows are international movements of funds that have been illegally earned or are being illegally transferred or utilized. Such flows may involve proceeds of corruption or other crimes–or may be associated with efforts to evade corporate or individual taxation. According to Global Financial Integrity, developing countries are especially damaged by illicit financial outflows, losing some $6 trillion in the decade ending in 2011 and about $1 trillion per annum more recently. Illicit financial flows are thought to perpetuate poverty and forestall equitable development by depriving societies of tax revenue and investment capital that could be used to promote economic growth and alleviate deprivation.

The 2014 Amartya Sen Prize Contest is soliciting original essays of ca. 7,000 to 9,000 words on how illicit financial flows relate to global poverty and inequality. Such essays could be empirical, analyzing for instance the distributional impact of illicit financial flows on the evolution of poverty or inequality. They could be normative, reflecting perhaps on who bears what responsibilities for the adverse effects of illicit financial flows. Or they might be practical, defending for example a feasible and politically realistic reform idea that could help curtail such outflows.

The best entries will be presented at an international conference, November 7-9, 2014, at Yale University and subsequently published in a special issue of a prominent journal. In addition, at least two of the winning essays will receive a monetary award: a first prize of $5,000 and a second prize of $3,000. Professor Sen hopes to join us for the conference presentations.

Essays with more than one author will be accepted, although any monetary award will need to be shared amongst the authors.

Entries can be e-mailed to Rachel Payne at rachel@academicsstand.org and must reach her by October 5, 2014. We ask that entries be anonymized to facilitate blind refereeing. Winners will be selected by an expert jury, whose decisions are final.

ASAP is supporting ID100, a collaborative project to identify the 100 most important questions for development after the expiration of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015. Led by the Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID), ID100 aims to contribute to the discussion of the post-2015 development agenda. ASAP plans to submit up to 5 questions from members to ID100. Submit your question(s) by Tuesday, May 27, to be considered for inclusion in the list. (More details here)

ASAP is supporting ID100, a collaborative project to identify the 100 most important questions for development after the expiration of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015. Led by the Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID), ID100 aims to contribute to the discussion of the post-2015 development agenda. ASAP plans to submit up to 5 questions from members to ID100. Submit your question(s) by Thursday, May 29 at 12 noon EDT to be considered for inclusion in the list.

To be considered for inclusion in ASAP\’s submission, questions should be relevant to international development and adhere to the following criteria:

• Must be answerable through a realistic research design
• Must be of a spatial and temporal scope that reasonably could be addressed by a research team
• Must not be formulated as a general topic area
• Must have a factual answer and must not be answerable with \’it all depends\’
• Except if questioning a precise statement (e.g. \’does the earth go around the sun?\’), should not be answerable with \’yes\’ or \’no\’
• If related to impact and interventions, must contain a subject, an intervention, and a measurable outcome

Example questions:

• \”What are the most effective interventions for reducing the social gap in educational outcomes?\”
• \”What are the positive and negative impacts of digital technologies on poverty?\”
• \”What are the direct and indirect impacts of armed conflict on biodiversity?\”

If possible, please assign one of the 11 themes identified by the \’World We Want\’ campaign to your question: education, water, growth and employment, governance, inequalities, food security, energy, population dynamics, environmental sustainability, health, or conflict and fragility.

You may submit up to five questions for consideration. You will receive acknowledgment as the author of the question, although all questions will be submitted on behalf of ASAP.

The top five questions will be selected by a committee of ASAP global Board members, officers, chapter heads, and staff.

Submit all questions by e-mail to Rachel Payne at rachel@academicsstand.org by Thursday, May 29, at 12 noon EDT.

Learn more about ID100 and SIID at the ID100 website.