KCG Researchers Gave Presentations at the PEGNet Annual Conference

KCG PhD Fellows Finn Ole Semrau and Frauke Steglich joined the Annual Conference of the Poverty Reduction, Equity and Growth Network (PEGNet) on September 9-10, 2019 in Bonn. The conference brought together development researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to discuss topics related to this year’s conference theme “Promoting Social, Economic and Socio-political Development through Social Protection”.

Semrau gave a presentation on “Social Ties and ICT Adoption in Rural Developing Countries – A Holy Grail for Information Access?”, which is joint work with Dr. Linda Kleemann (Kiel Institute for the World Economy and GFA Consulting Group). Information and communication technologies (ICT) create opportunities to decrease information asymmetries between rural and urban areas in developing countries. Through fast access to precise and up-to-date information, they can improve agricultural results of smallholder farmers. While several studies have shown improvements in access to information in general, the question who rather benefits from ICT for information access remains underexplored. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence showing that farmers have strong social ties are those who tend to possess mobile phones and use internet.

In the poster session of the conference Steglich introduced joint work with Semrau on “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Global Value Chains (GVCs)”. In their paper they analyse the role of emerging market firms’ position in GVCs for their CSR spending. Refusal of globalization spreads all over the world and people’s awareness of negative social and environmental impacts within GVCs heavily fuels it. Against this background, firms being differently integrated into GVCs may engage themselves in CSR to different degrees to mitigate potential negative outcomes of production to also respond to the rising pressure from governments and the public. This paper contributes to the understanding of the drivers of emerging market firms’ engagement in CSR.

The conference was organised by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) and opened with a speech by Dr. Kacana Sipangule Khadjavi (IfW and PEGNet). The two keynote addresses were given by Prof. Stefan Dercon, Ph.D. (Blavatnik School of Government and University of Oxford) on “Social Protection in the Digital Age” and Prof. Saweda Liverpool-Tasie, Ph.D. (Michigan State University) on “Towards Relevance in Scholarship for Food Security and Poverty Reduction”.