Development Economics: Poverty and Human Development

This course will take you outside the world you know and grew up in and try to answer questions like: What is economic life like when living under a dollar per day? Are famines unavoidable? How can we end child labor—or should we? How do we make schools work for poor citizens? Does foreign aid help or hinder? Where is the best place to intervene and how can we measure what works? Should economic growth really be the main aim of human development or are other goals more important? Who gets to have a say in what development means – poor or rich people?

The course will look at poverty and human development from mostly a micro-economic perspective, but also introduce alternative and more critical views on development from other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and political science.

Course leader

Lara Fleischer

Target group

High school students

Course aim

Understand poverty and human development from mostly a micro-economic perspective, but also introduce alternative and more critical views on development from other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and political science.