Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Yale University
This annual event honors Simon Kuznets, the famous Belarusian-American economist who helped establish the Yale Economic Growth Center in 1961.
Globalization, for all its faults, has been good to many poor people living in developing countries. Millions in East Asia have escaped the threat of hunger by leaving the fields to work in factories producing manufacturing goods to sell in the West. But what happens to the prospects of the world’s poor when the West stops buying?
Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale, returned to campus on February 27, 2020 to deliver the 30th Annual Kuznets Memorial Lecture, presented by the Economic Growth Center. In her talk, “Poverty Reduction in the Era of Waning Globalization,” Professor Goldberg considered the effects of rising protectionism on poverty, and discussed approaches to poverty reduction in an era of high inequality and waning globalization.
Hosted annually by the Yale Economic Growth Center since 1987, the Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture features a prominent economist speaking on issues in economic development.
2020 Kuznets Mini-Conference: Trade and Development
Young economists presented new research on related topics on the day following Penny's lecture. David Atkin and Amit Khandelwal organized the mini-conference, and EGC hosted.
Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg
Pinelopi (Penny) Koujianou Goldberg is the Elihu Professor of Economics and an Affiliate of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. From November 2018 to March 2020, she was the Chief Economist of the World Bank Group. Goldberg was President of the Econometric Society in 2021 and has previously served as Vice-President of the American Economic Association. From 2011-2017 she was Editor-in-Chief of the American Economic Review. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Sloan Research Fellowships, and recipient of the Bodossaki Prize in Social Sciences. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER), Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and board member of the Bureau of Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD).
Goldberg is an applied microeconomist drawn to policy-relevant questions in trade and development. She has exploited a broad set of methodological approaches – ranging from estimation of structural industry equilibrium models to reduced form techniques – to provide insights into the determinants and effects of trade policies, trade and inequality, intellectual property rights protection in developing countries, exchange rate passthrough, pricing to market, and international price discrimination. Her most recent research examines the resurgence of protectionism in the U.S.; trade, poverty and inequality; the interplay between informality and trade liberalization in the presence of labor market frictions; and discrimination against women in developing countries.