FCDO Next Generation Economics competition 2021 winner announced
James Silvester has been named winner of the 2021 Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) Next Generation Economics competition.
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Winner of the 2021 FCDO Next Generation Economics competition: James Silvester (on left) with FCDO Deputy Chief Economist Tom Strachan (on right).
James Silvester, currently in year 12 at the John Port Spencer Academy in Derbyshire, has been named winner of this year’s Next Generation Economics competition. James’ letter to FCDO Chief Economist Rachel Glennerster outlined practice steps governments could take to address climate change.
Two competition runners up have also been announced: William Foxhall from Newstead Wood in Orpington and Ruby Newport Spiers from Portsmouth High School were named runners up for high-quality letters on global inequality and climate change respectively.
The winning entries
This year’s winning entry focused 2 possible policy options to address climate change: carbon labelling on food packaging to inform consumers, and a bottle-return scheme to encourage recycling.
FCDO Chief Economist Rachel Glennerster highlighted the strong use of economic evidence in the winning letter.
The discussion of a new food labelling system was based on economic theory and aimed to nudge consumers toward more environmentally-responsible decision-making by correcting an information failure. This was strongly supported by evidence from supermarkets in France. The discussion of a new bottle-return scheme was based on an interesting discussion of incentives, which considered the role of both consumers and producers.
Although a carbon labelling system is not currently UK government policy, recent action by the company Unilever to introduce a new labelling system illustrates the potentially important future role such a labelling system could play.
We hope that the Next Generation Economics competition will be back in 2022. See the Next Generation Economics page and FCDO Twitter account for updates.