International Development

(4 Credits)

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the core concepts, processes, theories, and issues international development. The focus will be on divergent theoretical approaches to international development and their empirical applications while studying different regions’ experiences of development. The field is characterized by contentious debates and we will explore these debates form multiple perspectives. Our objective is to gain an understanding of the problems of development and explore why some nations fail and others succeed, why some nations experience sustained economic growth while others grow and then stagnate by applying recently developed frameworks, i.e., Acemoglu and Robinson, North, Wallis, and Weingast, or Bates, to case studies from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.