Call for Proposals: STEG Larger Research Grants

Donor Name: Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG)

Country: Global

Type of Grant: Grant

Deadline: 09/19/2023

Size of the Grant: up to £100,000

Grant Duration: 24 months

Details:

LRGs of up to £100,000 (For this funding call, the £100,000 cap will be relaxed for projects with extraordinary data collection costs in low-income countries.) can fund research assistance, data collection and/or purchase, and teaching buyouts, or relevant remuneration practices, for the principal investigator and co-investigators from partner institutions. Grants also support travel to field sites, even when secondary data is utilised.

Themes

• Research may focus on broad systemic patterns and processes of structural transformation and growth for low-income countries, in a comparative sense across time or space, or more narrowly defined topics related to one or more of the following six research themes:
  • Data, measurement, and conceptual framing;
  • Firms, frictions and spillovers, and industrial policy;
  • Labour, home production, and structural transformation at the level of households;
  • Agricultural productivity and sectoral gaps;
  • Trade and spatial frictions;
  • Political economy and public investment.
• They also welcome work that intersects with Y-RISE’s interest in understanding policy interventions at large scales, with particular attention to work aimed at expanding the knowledge on the effects of electrification, falling into one or more of the following themes:
  • The role of electricity reliability in economic development;
  • Complementarities between electricity and other investments;
  • Migration and agglomeration under spatially uneven electrification;
  • Broad themes:
    • Macro, growth, and welfare effects of large-scale programs
    • Spillovers, networks, and equilibrium effects
    • Policy implementation and institutional capacity
    • Political economy effects of programs
    • Evidence aggregation and external validity

Focus Areas

• STEG is also focused around three cross-cutting issues that are simultaneously relevant to many areas of structural transformation, including the six research themes:
  • Gender;
  • Climate change and the environment;
  • Inequality and inclusion.

Funding Information and Duration

• Larger Research Grants (LRGs) are awarded up to the value of £100,000.
• An LRG is intended to be completed within 24 months.

Eligibility Criteria

• They welcome applications to the LRG calls from researchers all over the world, and encourage applications that propose collaboration between researchers from lower- and higher-income countries.
• In view of the current political situation and the imposition of economic sanctions on various Russian entities by Western governments, they are not currently able to accept proposals for projects that include researchers or members of the research team who are based at Russian institutions.
• Principal investigators applying to LRG calls should currently have a PhD or be enrolled in a PhD programme. Although there are no formal qualification requirements for co-investigators, co-investigators on STEG-funded projects usually have a PhD or are enrolled in a PhD programme. The knowledge, expertise, and qualifications of the entire research team will be taken into account when evaluating the proposal.
• They welcome submissions from PhD students to the regular LRG calls. However, given the scale of funding of the LRGs, all applicants will be assessed on their capability and experience in conducting data collection and research more broadly at this scale.
• They anticipate that PhD students applying on their own may struggle to compete with more established researchers. As a result, they encourage PhD students to apply as part of a team alongside more senior co-investigators, which may help to demonstrate the project’s feasibility and credibility. For all PhD students acting as principal investigators, they require a letter of support from your PhD supervisor no later than two weeks after the deadline.

For more information, visit Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG).