Shared Societies: The Economic Case

The Club de Madrid and the Maastricht School of Management wanted to respond to the challenge of encouraging new thinking on the link between economic performance and social conditions. We invited a range of thinkers and writers from intergovernmental bodies, policy think tanks, academia and activism, including some junior researchers, to come together and share their perspectives. Those perspectives were deliberately very different because we wanted to involve scholars and policy makers who may not have already made the link between social and economic conditions and challenge them to look at the issue through the lens of their particular discipline and experience. They came together at an international conference at the Maastricht School of Management at the end of March 2012. This paper provides a summary of the papers presented at the conference. The full papers are made available as MsM Working Papers, and are available, together with audio and video clips of the conference, on www.msm.nl.