December 2021
This edition offers five synthesis of Paris School of Economics APE and PPD masters students’ dissertations. The PSE thanks the students for their participation, their master’s thesis supervisors for their inputs and the masters’ directors Bernard Caillaud, Jean-Philippe Tropeano, Luc Behaghel and Akiko Suwa-Eisenmann for their collaboration.
Are water shortages a source of discontent ? The case of the Democratic Republic of Congo
Ny Sata Andrianirina (Master PPD)
On 28 July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly declared that “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation [is] a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.” Ten years later, it is clear that water stress or scarcity remain a serious concern in developing countries and have negative effects on both physical health (including diarrhoea, cholera, typhus, hepatitis, malaria, etc.) and mental health, creating anxiety and depression...
- Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/31Wmk7k
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Would “helicopter money” be more efficient than current monetary policy?
Yann Perdereau (Master APE)
Since the 2008 financial crisis, central banks, especially the European Central Bank (ECB), have been trying to support growth and to reach the 2% inflation target. The ECB’s main tool, lowering the interest rate, is no longer functional because some rates are currently negative: central banks are thus turning to an unconventional instrument, namely, the purchase of securities on financial markets, or quantitative easing financed by money creation...
- Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/31PXl61
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Unveiling the Cosmic Race: Racial Inequalities in Latin America
Guillermo Woo-Mora (Master APE)
The Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos prophesized hundred years ago: “We will achieve in America, before any other place globally, to the creation of a race made with the treasure of all precedent [black, indian, mogul and white]: the final race, the cosmic race.” Effectively, nowadays, most Latin Americans self-describes as mestizo or mulato – métisse in French–. The latter broad-ethnic categories are understood as the ethnic-racial mixture between Indigenous, African, and Europeans resulting from the miscegenation process during the colonial period...
- Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/3pLSvP8
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How did France revolutionise its energy mix in the 1970s?
Cécile Fraysse (Master PPD)
Global warming raises, in dramatic fashion, the question of the energy mix. France has already been through a major energy mix change, in the 1970s, when it turned towards nuclear energy. That choice profoundly transformed the country’s energy history. What economic and political forces drove that decision? In the 1970s, a number of technologies were used to produce civil nuclear power including natural uranium graphite gas reactors (French technology), and boiling water and pressurised water reactors (American technology)...
- Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/31Utf0Q
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How important is geography for sustainable development?
Eva Gossiaux (Master APE)
The mutual relationship between economic activities and environmental degradation has been an important research topic in the economic literature. Yet, geographic patterns of pollution exposure and their evolution through time remain poorly addressed questions, as existing works generally focus on the temporal dynamics of ecological-economic systems. However, the spatial dimension is essential to realistically describe many environmental problems...
- Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/3DTBfwi
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To read the previous “5 papers... in 5 minutes!”, click here