IIM Calcutta virtually organized the third edition of the Professor Amitava Bose Memorial Lecture on 9th February. The lecture was delivered by Nobel laureate Professor Abhijit Banerjee.

Amidst a virtual audience of over 500 people from across the globe with a mix of students, professors and economists, Prof. Anju Seth, former Director, IIM Calcutta welcomed the distinguished speaker Nobel Laureate Prof. Banerjee to speak on the perceptive subject of the ‘Poverty trap’. Honouring Prof Amitava Bose’s legacy, Prof Seth shared that she herself was his student at IIM-C and reminisced engaging conversations with him both inside and outside the classroom. Prof Banerjee spoke of his long association with Prof Amitava Bose who was his father’s, the legendary Prof Dipak Banerjee’s student.

Professor Bose was a great inspiration to Prof. Banerjee who shared the same intellectual aspirations. The subject of Prof Banerjee’s session was about ‘Temporary Interventions and its impact on Poverty Traps’. He explained the theoretical framework of capital accumulation model and showed how one time temporary boost in capital stock can lead to breaking away from the poverty trap to virtuous cycle leading to huge social returns on investment. He then discussed various reasons why poverty traps exist including his work on credit constraints and risk appetite constraints of the very poor which leads to the poverty trap. Professor Banerjee elaborated with imperial evidence by showing results from multiple randomised controlled trial (RCT) conducted in Ghana, Honduras, India and Bangladesh etc. to hint that short term interventions can have a huge impact to overcome poverty traps. He concluded that this has key implications in terms of policy design and social sciences.