Econ 327: Economic Development in Africa
Course Description
This course will examine the central issues of development economics with a geographical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Our methodological approach will be to use primary data and rigorous empirical methods to examine patterns of economic activity and to evaluate the effectiveness of development policies and programs. The focus of the class will be on your own examination of primary data from multiple surveys from Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania as you write a series of nine short papers about these topics.
Topics
Development economics is a large and rapidly growing field and Africa is a tremendously diverse continent. From the multitude of potential courses that one could design around issues of economic development in Africa, I have chosen to focus on daily life. How do people, families, firms and communities organize their economic lives when faced with the tight constraints imposed by their environment? We will read about this environment; about the definition and distribution of poverty; about the complex interactions between health, education and economic well-being; about agriculture and rural economic organization; about risk and financial markets; and about public goods and their allocation
Econ 425-2: Theory of Economic Development
The goal of this course is to prepare you for research in development economics. We begin with an example of a sustained research program on risk, saving, credit and insurance that illustrates the interplay between observation, theory, empirical testing and experimentation, bringing together many of the themes of the field. We continue with the analysis of households, agricultural technology and markets.