 Economic Development, History, Theory and Practice, ECON 366. My name is Karthik Mishra. I'll be your instructor for the course in summer 2060. So this is an introductory lecture designed to give you an overview of the course and tell you what the requirements of the course are, what the readings entail and what you're expected to do. Now, what is this course all about? This course aims to provide students with a rounded understanding of key theories that inform thinking about development. It talks about the basic paradigms and the development economics, policies that have been tried, policies that have failed, successful instances in development and how the process of economic development is been practiced over the course of the few decades that it has. It is an important course that integrates findings from several social sciences, not just economics, but also sociology, anthropology, history and of course economics. Within economics, it's a relatively new field of study. It again borrows heavily from research in behavioral economics, microeconomics, macroeconomics and other fields of economics. Now, the focus of this course is to provide you with theoretical underpinnings of dominant ideas and theories that have dominated the thinking in this field for a considerable amount of time. And what are we using all of this for? We are using all of this for to provide some flavor of the experience of development policy and debates around issues of globalization, about issues of agrarian change, international trade, environmental problems that are related to development. So this course basically introduces you to different analytical perspectives within the historical context and aims to start a debate around some basic questions like why are some regions richer than the others? Why is there massive inequality? Is inequality good? Is inequality bad for economic growth? What can we do to make sure that the environment is preserved as economic growth takes place and so on and so forth? So by the end of this course, you would be introduced to the major problems and major policy debates within development economics and you would be able to use this understanding in your applied work or your theoretical work on development studies. Now, this course is basically going to synthesize work from a variety of papers, textbooks and essays written over a period of time. So in terms of the reading requirements, the first of course is a basic textbook called Development Economics written by Professor Dave Rajde and published by Princeton. So this is a core textbook for the course, however it's not the only reading of the course. For every topic this reading will be supplemented by a couple of other papers, newspaper reports and articles from academic journals to help you, help provide you with a much more holistic view of the subject. What is required of you in this course? Basically there are three requirements, a term paper, your weekly responses and exams. So a term paper is supposed to be a well researched paper that you produce on any of the topics that are covered in the course. You are free to choose which topic you want. It should be somewhere between 12 and 15 pages and it's worth 35% of your grade. So it is an extremely, extremely critical and the single largest component of the course. Second, you know, weekly responses. Now you know this is an online course, face-to-face interaction is not going to happen. So it's important that students remain engaged with the material, finish their readings on time and one of the ways in which I as an instructor can assess that is by reading your responses that you write every week. Now every week I'll put out a discussion question to which you have to respond by Friday morning. Now the way it works is that if you, that you have to submit your own reply to that question by Friday and from Friday to Monday you have to reply to somebody else's response on that question. What this ensures is that, you know, learning takes place in a, in a more cohesive, in a more open environment where people are discussing with each other, debating with each other. And occasionally people may have strong views on certain subjects and we can have a nice, healthy debate on them. So that's the purpose of this. And finally, exams. So there's going to be one midterm exam and one final exam. Both exams will be based on short answer questions, very basic exams because the main sort of purpose, the main sort of takeaway of the course is going to be demonstrated in your, in both your term papers and your weekly responses as well. Now since it's an online course, it's very important that we stick to deadlines in order to make sure things work. So due dates for exams, term papers, weekly responses are all very, very strict. Unless you have a valid university sanctioned excuse, you know, I'd really appreciate if you stick to the deadlines. Now finally, what, what is it that we are going to study in this course? The syllabus is divided into five modules. The first one is discusses the concepts of measurements of development. Now this part technically deals with the concepts of GDP, economic growth. Why is it sufficient to capture development through GDP growth? Do we need to augment it with other measures like the HDI index or the Global Happiness Index? Or do we need to scrap the GDP focus altogether and think of a more meaningful way in which we can assess economic development? Next we talk about measures of poverty and measures of inequality in great detail. Why are these important? We, these are critical to our understanding of the problems of development. Why is it that so much poverty exists in countries even though, you know, there is unprecedented opulence in the world? Why is it that in countries like India, more people are undernourished and under the poverty line than any other country? But at the same time, India also has the third or the fourth largest list of dollar billionaires in the Forbes list. So questions like this are extremely important for our understanding of the process of economic development. The second module, economic backwardness, neoliberalism and radical development critiques, places the concept of economic backwardness in its historical perspective. Traditionally, historically, how have we identified backwardness? What are its components? Can you characterize a backward economy by the absence of modern technology or heavy reliance on agriculture or lack of proper education? Or the presence of a lot of modern industry but a very large informal sector? There can be several ways in which you identify economic backwardness and this sort of module aims to help you do that. It then talks about neoliberalism, which some of you may know is or until recently was the reigning economic paradigm in our thinking. Since the 1980s or late 1970s to the 2008 crisis, the thinking of economic development was fairly guided by ideas of neoliberalism. And off late in the past decade or so, this thinking of neoliberalism, which by the way is a fairly laissez-faire economy with very little or no role for the government as a whole, and its belief that the markets know best how to allocate resources and all development processes should be left to the market itself, has been criticized very fiercely by economists belonging to the Marxian school or to other schools of thought, and how their critique has managed to dent this paradigm of neoliberalism and what are some of the alternatives that we have. The third module Globalization, International Trade, Development Aid and National Debt is a fairly large and complicated sort of setup of things that we are trying to cover in this module. So the purpose would be to try and introduce you to some of the major themes and try to give you access to resources which you may pursue in case any of these are of interest to you. Now, what is globalization? And this course will tell you that it's a process of integration of countries on economic ties and cultural grounds and social grounds and so on and so forth. But what's important to note is that this process is not new, it has been with us for a long time, but modern economic globalization has certain specific characteristics that sort of decide how our infrastructure on trade, how our finance flows are structured and those rules of the game or institutions have a severe impact on the development process. So what we'll talk about is whether these rules benefit economic development or they sort of hinder it. And then what is the role of developmental aid, right? How does it enter the picture of development? Does it actually help its beneficiaries? Does it have a positive impact on the ground or is it counterproductive or the entire sort of setup more complex and should not be reduced into these binaries of useful or counterproductive. The next module, module 4 talks about agriculture, land reforms and rural livelihoods in the 21st century. As you know, in developing countries, agriculture forms the backbone of the economy, not just being a sector that provides a large component of the GDP, but also as a sector that is the main employer of people, right? And how this sector interacts with the small industrial sector in these countries? What role does it play in the industrialization process? What role does it play in the trade process of these countries is extremely important? And how are rural livelihoods conditioned by the presence of this sector? What are the technologies that this sector uses? What are some of the common practices in this sector? How are land, labor and credit markets in this sector structured has a huge impact on the livelihoods of people who live in this sector. And finally, this will also talk about how there are structural reasons why the agricultural sector is different, why the agricultural sector in developing countries is different from the modern capitalist sector that we have. Both in these countries and in advanced countries. Finally, the last module talks about environmental development, which as you know is an increasingly important subject, both from a sustainability of development point of view and also from a survival point of view. We do not want a process whereby gains of economic development made over decades are wiped off due to environmental factors. Now, there are several ways in which the conditionality of environment becomes critical to our thinking of development. And one of the most commonly observed themes that we'll talk about is the environment growth trade-off. Is there a trade-off between high economic growth and environmental sustainability? In the process of industrializing first, is are we necessarily going to harm the environment? And if so, who bears the brunt of it? And if not, then how can we circumvent this trade-off? So, these are some of the major themes that we are going to discuss in this course. I look forward to active participation from all of you. I look forward to a great lively discussion. I look forward to a very interesting semester where we discuss all of these findings, all of these theories and empirical findings and try to sort of shape our understanding of economic development in a more sort of holistic and historic context. So, once again, welcome to Development Economics, Econ 366. I look forward to interacting with all of you. And, you know, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me. My email address is on the course website. I can make sure that we have a way in which your questions are answered as soon as I can. So, yeah, looking forward to meeting you all soon. Thank you.