What are the constraints that prevent rural societies in developing countries from raising their standards of living? This event also explores the potential for policy change and new technologies to remove these constraints.

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT and a founder and director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research network specializing in randomized evaluations of social programs, which won the BBVA Foundation "Frontier of Knowledge" award in the development cooperation category. Duflo is an NBER Research Associate, serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and is Director of the Center of Economic Policy Research's development economics program. Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health and policy evaluation.

Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the American Economic Association's Elaine Bennett Prize for Research (2003), the "Best French Young Economist Prize" (Le Monde/Cercle des economistes, 2005), the Médaille de Bronze (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 2005), and the Prix Luc Durand-Reville (Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 2008). In 2008-2009 she was the inaugural holder of the international chair "Knowledge Against Poverty" at the College de France.

After being a co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics, she currently serves as the founding editor of the AEJ applied.

The International Growth Centre promotes sustainable growth in developing countries by providing demand-led policy advice based on frontier research. Based at LSE and in partnership with Oxford University, the IGC was initiated by and is funded by DFID.

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