Pedro Conceição is Director of the Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Prior to that, he was Director, Strategic Policy, at the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support of UNDP. His previous roles at UNDP include Chief-Economist at the Regional Bureau for Africa and Director of the Office of Development Studies. He has co-edited books on financing for development and on global public goods. He has published on inequality, the economics of innovation and technical change, and development. Prior to joining UNDP, he was an Assistant Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal where he taught and researched on science, technology, and innovation policy. Pedro Conceição has degrees in Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico in Economics from the Technical University of Lisbon, and a PhD in Public Policy from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied on a Fulbright scholarship.
Pedro Conceição is grateful for comments on his contribution to this report from Hoi Wai Cheng, Leonard Goff, Xiao Huang, Marcelo Lafleur, Christina Lengfelder, Brian Lutz, George Gray Molina, Shivani Nayyar, and Heriberto Tapia.
A long-held tenant of development policy is that economic growth is of prime importance. Growth expands incomes, and without a growing national income there is little or nothing to redistribute. Without a growing pie, the political and social dynamics would revert to a zero-sum game and thus, an expanding income makes it politically more feasible to redress inequality. Also, growth drives poverty reduction, and that is the overriding objective of development – and of social policies around the world.