ArmInfo. The Central Bank of Armenia, together with J-PAL Europe, organized a seminar, "From Evidence to Policy: Building a Culture of Experimentation," with the participation of Nobel Prize laureate in economics and one of the world's leading economists, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee. The seminar took place on September 22 in the Armenian resort town of Dilijan (Tavush Region). The seminar focused on the development and implementation of policies based on facts and scientific research.
The seminar discussed the possibilities of institutionalizing approaches to the development and evaluation of evidence-based policies. In Armenia, this includes the initiative to create an "Evidence-to-Policy Lab." In collaboration with the Government of the Republic of Armenia.
The seminar presented the experiences of Luxembourg, France, and Uzbekistan, where evidence-based and experimental methods were used in public policy development and evaluation. Presentations of international experience allowed for consideration of how these mechanisms could be applied in Armenia.
The seminar will be followed by a three-day autumn school, "Experimental Methods," jointly organized by the Central Bank of the Republic of Armenia and J-PAL Europe, where participants will learn about methods for policy evaluation and experimental research.
It is worth noting that Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the 2019 Nobel Laureate in Economics, which he shared with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their research and development of an experimental approach to reducing global poverty. He was a longtime professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and since July 2026, Banerjee has been a professor of economics at the University of Zurich.
Abhijit Banerjee is a co-founder of J-PAL, a global research network of hundreds of scholars collaborating with governments, international organizations, and other partners to evaluate the effectiveness of public policies using scientific and experimental methods and to apply the resulting knowledge to policymaking and decision making.
