Lunch Seminar: Human mobility: potential and resistance

Date: 

Friday, April 28, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Perkins Room (R-415), 4th Floor Rubenstein, HKS

Speaker: Lant Pritchett, Professor of the Practice of International Development, Harvard Kennedy School

About the Session: Professor Lant Pritchett will present the four "risks and costs of migration" to host countries (Economic, Cultural Assimilation, Political and Security) and discuss the often overlooked gains of migration to both rich and middle income countries. He will give examples of how different "types" of countries can address the above mentioned costs and benefits from worker mobility. 

Lant PritchettAbout the Speaker: Lant Pritchett is Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (as of July 1, 2007). In addition he is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Global Development. He was co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics and worked as a consultant to Google.org. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 with a B.S. in Economics and in 1988 from MIT with a PhD in Economics. After finishing at MIT Lant joined the World Bank, where he held a number of positions in the Bank's research complex between 1988 and 1998, including as an adviser to Lawrence Summers when he was Vice President from 1991-1993. From 1998 to 2000 he worked in Indonesia.

From 2000 to 2004 Lant was on leave from the World Bank as a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2004 he returned to the World Bank and moved to India where he worked until May 2007. Lant has been part of the team producing many World Bank reports, including: World Development Report 1994: Infrastructure for Development, Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why (1998), Better Health Systems for Indias Poor: Findings, Analysis, and Options (2003),World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for the Poor, Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reforms (2005).

In addition he has authored (alone or with one of his 22 co-authors) over 50 papers published in refereed journals, chapters in books, or as articles, at least some of which are sometimes cited. In addition to economics journals his work has appeared in specialized journals in demography, education, and health. In 2006 he published his first solo authored book, Let Their People Come, and in 2013 his second, The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning.

Lant, an American national, was born in Utah in 1959 and raised in Boise, Idaho. Perhaps because of this, he has worked in, or traveled to, over fifty countries and has lived in three other countries: Argentina (1978-80), Indonesia (1998-2000), and India (2004-2007, & 2011-2012). Lant has been married since 1981 to Diane Tueller Pritchett and together they have three children.