UTEA Excellence Award: Studying Income Inequality

April 24, 2014

On the recommendation of our department and the Faculty, Andre Sinaga, a highly skilled Economics student who currently holds the Chancellor’s Scholarship at Trinity College, has been awarded a competitive U of T Excellence Award (UTEA). The award will permit him to work this summer on Jacques Bertrand’s project entitled, “Resource Booms and Inequality in Rising Democracies”.

Andre, who is a financial economics specialist, will be examining the impact of resource booms on reducing or exacerbating social inequality in recent high-growth states such as Brazil, South Africa, India, and China. The project will focus on developments in the mining and energy sectors in his native Indonesia and his well-structured study plan will have him scrutinizing taxation and royalty regimes, constructing tables, offering descriptive statistical analyses, and building a timeline of economic and policy developments over the past two decades. Part of Andre’s research will include summarizing Indonesian newspaper articles and his facility in the language will therefore prove invaluable.

 

Click to read more about Professor Jacques Bertrand.