Growth and Development builds on concepts and theories presented in some first and second year courses, such as Multidisciplinary Economics and Intermediate Macroeconomics. We take a multidisciplinary approach in the course, by exploring the relationship between growth and development with, for example, institutions, the environment, geography, and biology. We extend the Intermediate Macroeconomics course, which covers long run processes of economic growth, to explain persistent differences in income levels around the world by focusing on developing countries.
Human development has many facets other than pure economic growth. We analyse these facets from an economic perspective in combination with insights from other disciplines.

• We start the course by presenting a general overview of the world today regarding living standards, education, health, inequality, and longevity. We discuss questions such as: what is development and how do we measure it?
• We continue by discussing the fundamental factors of economic development, including history, colonialism, geography, and institutions. We also explore issues related to human interaction through trade flows, capital flows, transfers of knowledge, and institutional developments.
• Next, we analyse important problems of human development facing developing countries today, such as inequalities & gender issues, health, demographic transition, education, and poverty.
• Towards the end of the course we combine several ideas introduced in the initial lectures into a new perspective on the increasing importance of location in economic development, including geographical economics and multinational firms.
• We conclude with issues of global governance, by discussing global leadership, public goods, global threats, fragmentation, and conflicts.

Academic skills
This course focuses on the following academic skills:

Communication skills: Being able to present any subject without specific instruction in a convincing manner to a broad audience.

Academic reasoning
For independent large economic and multidisciplinary problems/questions:

• Thinking conceptually, thinking in terms of theory.
• Identifying links between problems.

Social responsibility: Being able to work effectively in teams without specific intervention or instruction.

Format
Lectures and tutorials. The tutorials consist of presentations and discussions by students organised in teams; all students are member of a team determined during the first session.

• Attending the first tutorial is required to participate in the course; this tutorial provides detailed instructions and determines team membership.
• Each team will choose / be assigned a developing country, for which it will analyse, answer, and hand in several different assignments.
• Each team will present the answers to one of the assignments in one tutorial.
• Each team is responsible for a presentation or a discussion of the course material in one tutorial.

Assessment method

• Written exam (50% of the final grade).
• Paper presentation or discussion, participation, and assignments (50% of the final grade).

Effort requirements
Active participation in at least 80% of the tutorials.

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN number. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.