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Syllabus for AAE/Econ 474 Economic Problems of Developing Areas

In 2012, one out of seven people in the developing world was living on less than $1.90 per day. One out of three people in the developing world was living on less than $3.10 per day. Health status, educational attainment, and government quality are substantially lower in developing countries than in developed countries. Why are so many people so poor and what constrains them from catching up? What strategies can be effective in moving people out of poverty? The intention of this course is to explore the causes and correlates of global poverty, and discuss policies used to address it. We will begin the class by defining development, poverty, and inequality and looking at some general trends in these measures. We will then look at human capital within which we will cover health, nutrition, education, population, and fertility. After that we will look at finance including informal insurance, traditional credit, microcredit, roscas, and savings. From there we will move on to look at big-picture issues such as institutions, corruption, the environment, property rights, and foreign aid. Many of the papers we will read in this course will be empirical and one of the goals of this class will be to learn how to read, understand, and criticize empirical work. You do not need to have taken an econometrics course since we will cover the necessary tools in class. The approach of the course is microeconomic, meaning that we focus on individual and household behaviors, as well as market failures which lead to sub-optimal choices by these individuals. This course will not cover macroeconomic topics such as growth, trade, or globalization. This is not because these are not important topics, but rather because there