Nobel Prize laureate Professor Esther Duflo addresses the Solari Lecture 2023

The Solari Lecture 2023 took place on Thursday, 12 November in Geneva. The guest speaker was Professor Esther Duflo, laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019 and the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The event opened with speeches from Professor Markus Menz, Dean of the Geneva School of Economics and Management, and Yves Flückiger, Rector of the University of Geneva. Professor Duflo was introduced by her long-standing colleague GSEM Professor Giacomo De Giorgi.

In her presentation: “Good Economics for Warmer Times”, Esther Duflo discussed the link between growth, wealth, and pollution. According to this view, poor countries, which are less polluting, are also the ones that suffer the most due to a lack of resources, with the only option being for them to grow richer to cope with global warming.

Professor Duflo believes that we cannot tackle climate change without tackling redistribution across countries and that the world needs to commit to a mechanism to raise money for a fund, exclusively destined for low-income countries. These points were further discussed in a Q&A session with members of the audience.

Each year, the Solari Lecture welcomes distinguished guests specialized in economics and econometrics, in memory of Luigi Solari, professor at the University of Geneva and pioneer in introducing research in econometrics in Switzerland. Since its first edition in 1979, this conference has featured many notable guest speakers.

> Watch the recording of the Solari Lecture 2023.
> Read Esther Duflo's interview in Campus - UNIGE's scientific magazine (in French).