Congratulations to Clare Balboni who has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for her project: Managing local and global externalities from growth. Clare is Director of the Economics of Environment and Energy programme at STICERD and Assistant Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. 

The prestigious grants aim to help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, build research teams and pursue their most promising ideas.

With a total funding of €761 million awarded to 478 early-career researchers across Europe, ERC Starting Grants are highly sought-after and are estimated to create up to 3,000 jobs within the teams of the new grantees.

Clare Balboni said: “I am delighted and hugely grateful to have received this support from the ERC to advance a research agenda focused on how developing countries can manage the consequences of the externalities associated with their growth. In order to balance the benefits of growth and its attendant externalities, there is a vital need for progress in accurate measurement of these externalities, analysis of how they affect economic decision-making and outcomes, and feeding these estimates into policy design. These aims will be at the centre of the research supported by this grant, which I am very excited to take forward.”

Project summary: The burden of local and global externalities from growth - such as pollution, congestion and climate change - falls mainly on the poorest across and within countries. This research agenda aims to inform the key question of how developing countries can manage the consequences of the local and global externalities associated with their growth. It will offer novel insights into the magnitude and distribution of these externalities in low-income countries, and the design of policies that balance the dual imperatives of shielding vulnerable populations and continued growth. A first theme will consider how local externalities alter assessments of the aggregate and distributional impacts of trade facilitation, which is key for the design of transport and trade policies. The second theme studies how vulnerable populations respond to the global externalities from climate change and how policy can support these adaptive adjustments.

Find out more on the LSE news pages and on the ERC website.