ECO 371 - Seminar: Economic Development & Public Policy

Course Units: 1

The course will introduce students to the main concepts in development economics, such as modern growth theories and their relevance for low-income countries, and major topics in policy and research within the field. In the first part of the course, we will concentrate on the development facts, the main explanations highlighted in the field of economics for differences in growth and income levels between rich and poor countries, the concept and measurement of poverty as well as differing techniques for econometric analysis like difference-in-differences, instrumental variable regression, and regression discontinuity. In the second part of the course we will study microeconomic fundamentals of economic development. We will concentrate on topics such as fertility, nutrition and health, education, labor markets, intra-household allocation of resources infrastructure, credit and savings, the future of economic development policy, and the relation among them. Empirical evidence from developing economies will be employed extensively paying special attention to the methods used. CC: SOCS, WAC