WECON 2022 To Address Digital Infrastructure and Development in the Caribbean
By Clifford Agugoesi, Editor-in-Chief
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and The University of the West Indies (The UWI) will collocate regional and international industry experts and academics as part of the West Indies Economics Conference 2022 (WECON) discussion on Digital Infrastructure and Development in the Caribbean. The session will take place on Thursday, March 10, 2022 at 1:30 p.m. EST/ 2:30 p.m. AST.
Experts believe that closing regional digital and telecommunications infrastructure gaps with the world’s most advanced economies could yield dividends in productivity, employment, and growth, which is true for all Latin American and Caribbean countries, and especially so for the IDB’s 6 Caribbean member countries (The Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago) —where benefits in terms of GDP growth are often at a scale much larger than the required investment.
The main speakers at WECON are Professors Janet Currie and Matias D. Cattaneo of the University of West Indies.
Janet Currie is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and the Co-Director of Princeton’s Center for Health and Wellbeing. She also co-directs the Program on Families and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has served as the Vice President of the American Economics Association and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the American Academy of Art and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Society of Labor Economists, and of the Econometric Society, and has an honorary degree from the University of Lyon and the University of Zurich. She is on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science and has served as the Editor of the Journal of Economic Literature and on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Her research focuses on health and wellbeing, especially of children. She has written about early intervention programs, programs to expand health insurance and improve health care, public housing, and food and nutrition programs. Her current research focuses on socioeconomic differences in health and access to health care, environmental threats to health, and mental health.
Matias D. Cattaneo is a Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) at Princeton University, where he is also an Associated Faculty in the Department of Economics, the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML), and the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS). His research spans econometrics, statistics, data science and decision science, with particular interest in program evaluation and causal inference. Most of his work is interdisciplinary and motivated by quantitative problems in the social, behavioral and biomedical sciences, extending across treatment effect and policy evaluation, applied economics, machine learning, empirical finance and decision theory, among other topics. As part of his main research agenda, Professor Cattaneo has developed novel semi-/non-parametric inference procedures exhibiting demonstrably superior robustness properties with respect to tuning parameter and other implementation choices. He currently serves in the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Econometrica, Operations Research, the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Econometric Theory, the Econometrics Journal, and the Journal of Causal Inference.
