Welcome to the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, generally referred to as SALISES. The Institute's history goes back to the early days of the University of the West Indies, with the formation of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) in 1948. ISER was established in advance of the faculty of Social Sciences in order to build a solid foundation of empirical data on the Caribbean region and functioned admirably in this capacity for some fifty years. In 2000, ISER merged with the Consortium Graduate School of the Social Sciences (CGSS), which was a novel, fifteen year- long initiative to train graduate students with an interdisciplinary perspective. SALISES seeks to merge the best research traditions of ISER with the high quality graduate teaching and supervision that was a hallmark of the CGSS.

Following a recent curriculum review, there is a new taught master's programme, the MSc in Development Studies, which is to begin in the academic year 2014-2015. There is also an MPhil/PhD option which offers an initial MPhil degree with possible advancement to the PhD based on quality of work accompanied by an oral upgrade examination.

SALISES' fellows are engaged in a wide range of individual and group research projects in areas including political reform, poverty,

local government, children's welfare, regional integration, international political economy,budgetary policy and social development.

In February 2010, SALISES launched its flagship research project '50-50', which through a series of some thirty-one local and international seminars, conferences and lectures, engaged in a critical review of the independence experience in the Commonwealth Caribbean over the past fifty years and made proposals for the possible social, economic and political directions for the next fifty. The culmination of the project in August 2012, was the five day conference entitled ‘Fifty-Fifty-Critical Reflections in a Time of Uncertainty’ which, it is hoped, will help forge the Institute’s research agenda for the immediate future.

The Documentation Centre is an in-house library of more than 70,000 books, documents and journals, servicing scholars in the social sciences and beyond. The Derek Gordon Data Bank is an on-line resource of Caribbean data sets accumulated from research undertaken by local, regional and international sources. In addition to the Mona Institute, there are also branches of SALISES at the Cave Hill and St Augustine campuses of UWI.