Trade,TrustDevelopment:SAsia

1 Credit · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

As the world’s economic center of gravity increasingly pivots to Asia, and as South Asia gradually enhances its role in the world economy, an economic understanding of the region becomes increasingly more important. This is a course about the evolution of South Asian countries, home to around 1.9 billion people, their contrasting development stories and paradigms, the economic and human interlinkages between them, and the vast untapped potential of those interlinkages. It is about the significant foregone development opportunities arising from insufficient regional engagement, that affect most countries in South Asia, including the three largest countries. As a region, most of South Asia was a part of successive empires, making cultural and economic interaction between countries a very natural phenomenon. After the Partition of 1947, and successive events thereafter, the region has contrived to create barriers to deeper engagement. This is not a course about India alone, nor about India-Pakistan. It is about South Asia.