ECON4331
Course Description
Historically, almost all people have lived in poverty, in the countryside, with short lifespans, limited education, and large families. However, during the last 200 years, the world has been changing rapidly. Material well-being has increased, life spans have lengthened, populations have urbanized, widespread illiteracy has given way to almost universal education, and women have much fewer children. These trends have transformed the life for billions of people, but they have also been uneven across different places, leading to the highly unequal world we see today. This course is about these large development trends. We will discuss how they have happened across different places, why they have happened, and why they have not happened everywhere.
The first half of the course documents the processes of economic growth, health improvements, urbanization, mass education, and the demographic transition. The second half of the course discusses what we know about the causes of economic and social development, and what type of policies that are most likely to help or hurt development. The course is a writing-intensive course, and throughout the course, there will a strong focus on measurement, data, and empirics. You will learn to independently download and visualize data on development using the R statistical language. You will also conduct some basic data and economic analysis of development data, and write up the results in a research paper (no previous knowledge required).