Courses:

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Topics covered in this course are available in the calendar below.

This is a course for those who are interested in the challenge posed by massive and persistent world poverty, have had some economics, and believe that economists might have something useful to say about this question. The questions we will take up include: Is extreme poverty a thing of the past? Why do some countries grow fast and others fall further behind? Does growth help the poor? Does foreign aid help? What can we do about corruption? Should we leave it all to the markets? Should we leave it to the non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Where is the best place to intervene? How do we deal with the disease burden? How do we improve schools? And many others.

This course assumes that you have completed 14.01 Principles of Microeconomics.

Banerjee, Abhijit V., Roland Benabou, and Dilip Mookherjee, eds. Understanding Poverty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780195305203.

For the short papers, you will each choose three general paper topics. Each Short Paper should be approximately 1500 words long. Please see assignments for paper guidelines.

For any use or distribution of these materials, please cite as follows:

Abhijit Banerjee, course materials for 14.11 Special Topics in Economics: The Challenge of World Poverty, Fall 2006. MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded on [DD Month YYYY].