SANEM started a new event for students from April 2019, called “Youthonomics”, with the belief in mind that engaging the youth in an intellectual and academic discussion is essential for developing a more informed and rational society. It is a monthly essay writing competition for the youth, that reflects their economic thoughts. Through Youthonomics, SANEM encourages young writers to voice their views and opinions on socio-economic issues. SANEM awards prize money and certificates to the winners of each episode of Youthonomics.

The 2nd episode of Youthonomics was held in May 2019. The topic of Youthonomics-2 was “Poverty Alleviation”. In their articles, participants presented their assessment of the poverty problem of Bangladesh, feasible policy suggestions to alleviate poverty, along with proposals on the mechanism of the collaborative approach to implement those policies.Recent estimates by World Bank, 736 million people live in extreme poverty on $1.90 or less a day. In this context, the first goal of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is to eradicate all forms of poverty. Both the public and private sectors are working to alleviate this multidimensional problem by identifying the underlying causes of poverty. According to most of the estimates, https://www.therapyheals.ca/valium-10mg/ Bangladesh has achieved a poverty reduction rate of around one percentage point a year since the early ’90s. According to Asian Development Bank, national poverty rate declined from 24.3 percent in 2016 to 21.8 percent in 2018 and the rate of extreme poverty has also decreased slightly to 10.5 percent in fiscal 2018-19 from 11.3 percent in fiscal 2017-18, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Despite notable achievements in reducing poverty, still around 40 million people in Bangladesh are poor and 21 million of them are in extreme poverty. Poverty is decreasing but both in rural and urban areas the rate is slow. It might not be possible to achieve the target of sustainable poverty reduction if the programmes are not economically efficient, socially justified and environmentally sound.

The winners of episode 2 were:

• 1st place: Shithee Ahmed, Department of Development Studies, Bangladesh University of Professionals and Salay Mostofa, Department of Economics, Bangladesh University of Professionals
• 2nd place: Anindya Adhikary, Department of Environmental and Resource Economics, Dhaka School of Economics
• 3rd place: Mehedi Hasan, Department of Economics, Cumilla University and Nazia Tasneem, Department of Economics, Jahangirnagar University

Prizes were distributed among the winners on May 25, 2019 at SANEM office.