This year's CRADLE conference, The World at a Turning Point: Cornell Conference on Development Economics and Law, takes stock of the global economy, with a special focus on the changing nature of labor markets, technological progress, inequality, climate change, and related laws and regulations. The three-day event is cosponsored by the Einaudi Center and the Department of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).

"Even if a country implements all the right policies, … it is still vulnerable to shocks that may emanate not from shortcomings of what it does within borders, but from the fact that countries are not coming together to address challenges."

On this page: Pedro Conceição, director of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report Office, speaks with Arpit Chaturvedi, Cornell MPA ’18 and research manager to CRADLE cofounder and Carl Marks Professor of International Studies Kaushik Basu (A&S). 

“Under Pedro Conceicao’s leadership, the Human Development Report has become one of the most important documents coming out of a multilateral institution,” Basu said. "It has widened the meaning of ‘human development’ and does not hesitate to wade into controversial themes and ideas."

Attend the Conference: The World at a Turning Point

A Conversation with Pedro Conceição

The UNDP Human Development Reports rarely focus on political issues, but the 2023–24 report released on Sept. 30 dedicates a chapter to political polarization. Why is addressing polarization crucial for providing global public goods?

For the most part, we know the kind of policies that would help countries and the international community to address shared challenges, from climate change to migration. The barriers to implementing these very rational—even obvious—policies seem to encounter difficulties that, it seems to us, lie beyond the realm of smart, technical policy advice. 

For instance, shifting incentives toward decarbonized economies would benefit from increasing the cost of carbon, but that has been incredibly difficult to implement, both within many countries and internationally. Also, many high-income countries face declining fertility rates, shrinking populations, and challenges such as labor shortages and pension sustainability. Yet, immigration, which would help quite a bit, is incredibly difficult to manage. 

In both cases, the difficulties lie more in the patterns of political polarization than in the technical details of what the solutions might be. So we felt that we needed to look into that a little bit to understand the meta-interventions that would make implementing the solutions to some of these challenges more likely to succeed.

The new report highlights how mismanaged interdependence, as seen in COVID-19, worsened inequalities. What lessons can be learned? How should institutions evolve to empower individuals in areas like climate change and digital governance?

One of the big takeaways is that even if a country implements all the right policies, makes all the right investments, and has “perfect” institutions, it is still vulnerable to shocks that may emanate not from shortcomings of what it does within borders, but from the fact that countries are not coming together to address challenges. 

One of my big worries is that we look at the COVID-19 pandemic, and we think that we have gotten over the bump and fail to draw the most important implications about the failures of collective action of countries in the international community. Or that we look at it as a sectoral challenge—a health problem—to be addressed by, say, a pandemic treaty.

That is needed, of course, but our report invites us to reflect on a broader set of challenges in which countries are interdependent: pandemics are an example, but so is climate change. The global public goods framework helps us understand what is common to these challenges. 

That analytical framework also enables us to understand what works and what works less well. For instance, because sovereign countries can always choose to leave an international treaty at will, we have to figure out ways they find it in their interest to remain in treaties. The trick is to have them realize that when it comes to global public goods, there are no zero-sum (competitive) dynamics, and structure incentives so that countries come on board. 

You've had a unique career path, transitioning from physics to economics and public policy and now working in political economy at UNDP. What inspired these shifts? 

I may have been guided by two things. One, curiosity. As a teenager, I wanted to understand the world through physics, particularly relativity, and quantum mechanics, which led me to study the math behind those theories throughout college. That took me through my college years and to my first professional experience, working on nuclear fusion in a European research project close to Oxford. 

Over time, my curiosity was less about the science as such, and more about what kind of difference science could make in improving people’s lives. I became interested in science, technology, and innovation policy, and my curiosity broadened to other aspects that could improve standards of living, culminating with my ongoing interest in economic development. 

I guess the other thing that drove me was trying to figure out where I could contribute the most. I was an average physicist, but it became clear to me that I would have to try to make more of a difference in other fields, so I studied economics and public policy and sought opportunities to learn and work in places where I could engage analytics to support decision-making.

Learn more about CRADLE and find out how to submit a paper to the open-access paper series.