 I'd like to welcome all of you to this Taster lecture for the Department of Economics. I'd like to welcome all of you even if I can't see you. So spare a thought of my predicament. I'm lecturing to the body. I'm sure you're there and you're listening to me, but I can't see a thing. I'd like to give you a sense of what the Economics Department is about and what kind of education you might expect at postgraduate level with us. So I'll do it by discussing some substantive issues of economic theory. But before that, I'd like to tell you at the outset that the Soyes Economics Department is quite unique. You might not see that reflected in the usual rankings that come out and basically way universities by the kilo across the world. You might not see that there, but there are good reasons for it. But those of you who follow Economics and Political Economy will know already that Soyes stands out at graduate level. And it stands out with good reason because it offers you a training in economics that you are likely to get in much of the rest of the world. It is actually quite unique because fundamentally it will train you in mainstream economics. You'll be a competent mainstream economist when you leave us, but it also trains you in political economy and in development economics. So it gives you an understanding of economic theory, applied economics, and in a sense the world economy gives you an understanding of these things which is quite specific to Soyes. You can't mistake Soyes graduates for anyone else, I can assure you, they stand out. Whereas the graduates of most other universities, you can permute and group-hute in many ways. They are often indistinguishable. If you are a Soyes graduate, you will stand out, I can assure you. So that much about Soyes and blowing around Trump, as it were, which I suppose is excusable in the circumstances. So let me tell you a couple of things of substance about what we do. Traditionally, we've been very good at developing economics combined with political economy. But obviously that has had an undertow of, in a sense, critical perspective and heterodoxy built in. And so increasingly, we also offer that as a separate specialization at master's level. If you don't wanna do development economics, you simply do an MSc in economics, which will train you in mainstream and heterodox theory. So in a sense, we've separated that out. But for the purposes of this talk, I want to focus on development economics and indicate the type of critical approach that we generally adopt here. And so in what way are we different? Let me say at the outset, in a sense, I'll begin with what I'm gonna finish, that the dominant approach in development economics today, if you go to the IMF or the World Bank or any of the grand multilaterals that shape policy across much of the developing world and so on. If you go there, the dominant approach is what we might still call the Washington Consensus. It hasn't got the grandeur that it used to have. It's not accepted the way it used to be. Again, for good reason because there've been successive crisis that have diminished this stature. But nonetheless, that's the bedrock. It's basically mainstream neoclassical economics that shapes the thinking of economists involved with the world economy in developing countries and approach that basically says markets are the best solution for most things and free flows of factors of production, capital, labor and so on is the way to go. I'll finish with that. That in order to make you see why that is dominant, we've got to go back and we've got to in a sense have a quick look at the trajectory of thought in developing economics and understand and appreciate why we ended up where we are with this kind of approach. And that is very much typical of what we do at SOS. We will give you this kind of depth of historical understanding of why we ended up with this kind of dominant approach which has not always been dominant at this time. It's dominant the last 30, 40 years. So why? Well, let's go back a bit. But before we go back, let's clarify a couple of ideas about growth and development. These are two different concepts although very closely related. So I will use them in a conventional way. Nothing terribly radical in terms of how I will deploy the concepts. So growth would basically be for my purposes here kind of quantitative change of some basic factors, some basic variables. So output, capital, labor and so on. Growth then would be quantitative change by and large. Economy is getting bigger. Development on the other hand would obviously involve quantitative change, would obviously involve growth, but it would be much more than growth. It would also be qualitative change. It would be a shift away from say a condition of pre-development and the development, backwardness to use a very old fashioned term when it comes to that. Towards modernity, towards development, towards the developed state of the world and whatever you're gonna call it. Another way of putting it is development is a shift towards market capitalism basically. The shift towards advanced market capitalism which basically means markets developing internationally and markets developing domestically and the most important market there would be the labor market. People making a living not from the land that much but from being employed for wages. And that would be a state of affairs whereby labor productivity would be rising rapidly and incomes would be increasing and then new forms of inequality would be emerging, a new society in other words. Now, how are we to understand this shift, this transformation, this state of affairs? If you start thinking about that, you won't be able to think of much else. I can assure you in economics, why does this happen? Why do we move into this state of existence of societies? This is not just me asserting it. This is a statement by one of the best known conservative mainstream economists, Robert Lucas, who basically said that once you start thinking about development, you can't think about anything else. And he was right, he was right. Why does it happen then? Well, we could do worse than start with Adam Smith who whichever way you slice it is the foundation stone of contemporary economics, whether that is straight economics, political economy, whatever it is. So we can start with Adam Smith and think with Adam Smith. Because of course he wrote at the time when this process that had just summed up for you was occurring in England, Britain actually more generally and bits of Northern Europe. And it was just about the only part of the world where this was happening. And that's what interested Smith. Why is it happening here? What does this mean? See, his book was called The Wealth of Nations. That's precisely what he was explaining, the wealth of nations. Why are nations becoming wealthy meaning entering this process of development that I just outlined. And Smith proposed three things. He basically said, the reason why this is happening is because human beings are learning first to engage in the division of labor. In other words, specialization. Specialization of work, division of labor is the key thing for Smith. And there's no doubt to me, we use that in economics all the time. It's a decisive insight that Smith had. If you make a pin by yourself, you can make a hundred in a day. If you divide the tasks of pin making, you can make thousands in a day, argument settled. So the division of labor is the key thing. But Smith, of course, so much more than that, much further than that. And he stressed that the degree to which the division of labor works and is effective depends on the extent of the market. In other words, how effective the division of labor will be depends on how big the market is towards which the product will go. So if you've got narrow markets, you're not gonna be doing very well even if the division of labor is quite elaborate. So markets and the extent of the market and selling for a big market is a key thing for development for Smith. But if you think about the little bit more like Smith did, you realize that there's something else that's missing. You can have big markets, you can have division of labor and still you might not be developing fast, right? Because the third thing is missing, which is of course, capital. Capital is necessary. Accumulated capital to invest in order to catalyze the process or a Smith called it stock. So Smith then mentioned these things and they are reference points for all development economics. The need for capital, the need for specialization in work and the need for markets in which to sell the output. This for Smith should be occurring and should occur in a sense spontaneously. See, don't forget Smith was involved in an argument against what people who are called mercantilists before his time. And these mercantilists had a very different view of development and growth. We're not gonna be going into that in development theory. If you do history of economic thought, you might be taught some stuff this that it serves but not for this purpose. But Smith was engaged in an argument with them. And what was crucial here was to say something about the state, the role of the state. And Smith was very much in a sense against direct state intervention in the economy. Meaning he was against direct state intervention in these three processes trying to shape the map. He wasn't against the state in the economy generally. He wasn't against the presence of the state in the economy. The state is there to ensure that this system works without interference. Works without being in a sense warped or disfigured. And that's about it. It should set the terms of the game, the rules of the game and then development can commence. Smith said a lot more, but I don't have the time. For us, that's the reference point. Another one of the great thinkers following Smith among the classicals was of course Ricardo, David Ricardo. Ricardo didn't have very much to say about the development process itself. Ricardo was much more in a sense static as an economist. Smith was very dynamic as I've just outlined for you. Ricardo was much more static in his concerns. He really wanted to work out the ways and the rules through which this output that kept growing along the lines that Smith suggested, this output was distributed. How is it distributed? Who gets shares of it? In other words, how much of this output end up with the capitalists? How much ends up with the workers? How much ends up with the landlords? The three great classes of society in Britain at the time and no other society is not just Britain. Ricardo was very concerned about that and that really took all his attention. In this context as he was working out what determines wages, profits and rent, which is another way of putting in incomes in other words. Working out these incomes, Ricardo postulated a view of the long-term development of this capitalist system and he was pessimistic. He thought that it wouldn't do very well in the long term and the reason why it wouldn't do very well is because the rate of profit would fall. The reason why the rate of profit would fall because it would be squeezed by a rising population and a falling productivity marginal product of land as the population expanded. Rate of profit is of course the rate of return on capital. If the rate of return on capital declines, clearly capitalists will not invest. If capitalists do not invest, then you don't have much development and certainly not much growth. So for Ricardo, the long-term prospects of capitalism given the division between labor, capitalism, labor workers, capitalists and landlords in society wasn't very good. Then the last of the classical economists or near-classical economists that we will be dealing with is of course, Marx. For Marx, the perspective was actually quite different. Now you can talk about Marx for weeks and then, but for our purposes I'll talk about him for about five minutes. And clearly, he learned a lot from Smith and Ricardo and from others. His own point about this process was actually different to both Smith and Ricardo. He was partly dynamic, like Smith, and partly static like Ricardo. He wanted to work out distribution issues and the key distribution issue for Marx was of course profits. What did turn is profits. Ricardo was also very concerned about profits, as I've said, but Marx looked into profits very deeply. And that's his only contribution in an original way, which of course is not accepted by most other economists because he associated profit with unpaid labor. He basically argued that profits come from unpaid labor. Not many economists accept that. Certainly, he's not generally accepted in society. Nonetheless, it's a powerful contribution. The import of which for our purposes is this. If profits come from unpaid labor and in this way, then profits are the driving purpose and the driving force of development. Development happens because there are profits. It doesn't happen because people want to create jobs or they want to create output. No, it happens because there are profits to be made and therefore there must be investment because that's how profit comes about. And so in Marx's analysis of capitalist development, the secret is to analyze why investment takes place. What is it that drives investments? And there, he had a lot of interesting things to say that have to do with competition between enterprises, between capitalists, how you succeed in competition. What does this mean for technology, the introduction of new technology? What does it mean for the productivity of labor, raising the productivity of labor in order to succeed in competition? And what are the implications for profitability as you do that? Because of course, the point is profit. Marx's argument then was that capitalism is very dynamic. It is a system that really capitalizes the growth process and the development process, but it's also very unequal and driven with crisis. As this process takes place, inequality emerges and crisis keep appearing. And you might say that that's an insight that has a lot to tell us about the modern world. So that much about the great in a sense, classicals. But obviously development economics, as we know it today, learns from these people, but works differently and has more specific roots. And the specific roots that it has, for our purposes, but also more generally, lie in the interwar years of the 20th century. Yeah, we learn from the classical theories of the 19th century, but the real foundation for development theory and development economics, the interwar years of the 20th century, the years between the first and the second world war, when very many important things happened. And one of the most important things for us as development economists and development theorists was, of course, Latin American structuralism. That is in an important way, a foundation stone for development economics. Now I want you to cast your mind back to that time and realize why that theory was so important. In the 1930s, the world market and the world economy was in deep crisis. Capitalism in the United States, in a sense, crashed. Europe was in deep trouble in terms of economic performance and employment was very high, production was low. The world market was fragmenting into different components, trade yet shrunk, credit was doing very badly, incomes were falling. It was a very difficult time for working people and others more generally. In that context, a group of economists in Latin America associated with Raul Prebis and many others began to think of what causes this and what are the implications for their countries? What does it mean for Brazil? What does it mean for Argentina? What does it mean for Latin America? What does this situation mean for these countries? And what should they do in order to enter a path of development, deal with this crisis and go down a path that would allow them to increase production, increase output, increase employment and increase the incomes of their people? It's in this context that structuralism emerged. Structuralism here has got many meanings that we can discuss Latin America structuralism for a long time, which of course we're not gonna do today, but structuralism takes its name from the fact that these economists stress the import of economic structure for understanding why development might or might not take place. And the import of structure is straightforward. What did the economies Latin America look like? They had for these structuralists a problematic structure. That's where the name comes from. Why? Because they had a traditional agricultural sector which had low technique and low labor productivity. And often this agricultural sector was dominated by big farms run by landlords, not very effectively with low technique and low labor productivity. They had a modern industrial sector, which was often associated with foreign capital, foreign enterprises coming in and engaging in this modern industrial sector. And the output was aimed for export. So that sector required inputs of capital goods in order to function technology to come from abroad. They had a low level of technical know-how. Know-how would come from abroad, not technical knowledge will come from mostly from abroad. They had several domestic rigidities of supply. In other words, agriculture would not be able to respond rapidly to change the economy. They would respond rapidly to changes because of the large farms operating in a certain way. The modern sector would not be able to respond quickly to changes in conditions in the world economy because it would be dominated by foreign firms and it would be not technologically advanced and producing internal technology and so on. So it would be rigidities of the economy. And last and crucial point, these economies would have high income elasticity of inputs. In other words, as soon as the development process started, given these structures, what would happen would be incomes would begin to rise a bit and as incomes rose a bit, inputs would rise into the country. Imports both partly of capital goods for production, but also of consumer goods for the urban population and more generally that would like to consume foreign consumer goods. As soon as that happened, a stop would emerge in the development process because imported goods would have to be paid for. The country would not generate enough surplus to do that. And then the mechanism was going to reverse and it would be blocked. In that context then Latin America structuralists came up with the development policy which gave its name to this approach and was characterized development economics for decades. And the argument was a structure must change. For the structure to change, policy was necessary. The structure would not change by itself. The government had to make it change. So immediately you see a key difference with the classical theorists. This wasn't a process that would happen by itself. Someone had to make it happen. They had to be development policy in other words. The development policy had to aim at changing the structure. What did that mean? Well, this was a difficult choice. And the way they resolved it at the time was the following. The emphasis should be on what they call a light industry. That's what should be promoted domestically. To promote that, you needed the policy that would protect domestic production. For that, you needed import controls. You needed to ring fence the economy to set an extent from precisely the process that I outlined previously, the incoming of inputs that would create the difficulties. So, import controls were necessary. And in addition to import controls, what was also necessary was government support for domestic industry to allow it to produce for the domestic market. And that meant credit support and tax support and institutional support generally. A whole entire range of measures and policies that would be aimed at strengthening domestic industry and allowing it to capture the domestic market. And on that basis, begin to grow. Inputs were also necessary for this as I indicated, but they would be inputs of capital goods, investment goods in order to support industry, not consumer goods. These would be produced domestically. So, there was a lot more, which I haven't got time to cover here. But that was the basic idea. Now, in that context, rising wages were not a bad thing because rising wages would create a domestic market for consumer goods, for the light industry. And so that could also be part of the development strategy. And that all the government was of crucial importance, as I've already indicated, to supervise the process, to manage it and to organize it. Now, there were many different variants of this. I've simplified brutally here, just to convey the main point. But that's the gist of it. So, input substituting industrialization was the key idea. If you actually look into the history of thought, you can identify elements of that approach long before the Latin America structuralists. For instance, there are German theorists, least above all, who began to think along those lines already from the middle of the 19th century. The idea that if you really wanted to join the advanced countries, Germany was not particularly advanced at that time, you really needed to protect it and use the state in order to do that. So these ideas go back some time, but the most systematic approach for our purposes can be found in the work of the Latin American structuralists. One further key point here is regards finance, which I've already mentioned. Credit was also very important to this process for the structuralists, and credit meant developing a credit system that would support precisely this process and not meant the bank-based system, a system of banks that would be controlled by public authorities, or they would operate within a system of public regulation, and they would support the process of growth and development that I previously applied by channeling savings to investment and by creating credit that would allow businesses and capitalists to invest on the last of their suggestions. But now this approach in different ways became prevalent in the past four years, not necessarily in exactly the same way that Raoul Prebish thought it, or rather Latin Americans began to discuss it back in the 30s or even in the 40s, but recognisably so in the 50s, 60s and much of the 70s. Those years were very peculiar years in the history of capitalism, and they were peculiar not only for developing countries, but also for developed countries, because you see what happened in the United States at that time, or in Britain, in France, and in Japan and elsewhere, what was then the developed world was that controls dominated. These were the years of Keynesianism. Keynesianism meant state intervention in policy to manage aggregate demand, and state intervention to supervise in a way the growth and development process, and crucially state intervention to control finance. These were years of control finance, control domestically and control internationally. These were the years in which the global flow of capital was not free. It was not possible to take your money from one country, move it to another in a matter of minutes, if it's all. These were unusual years. They were also years of the most rapid growth in the history of capitalism, incidentally, and the most rapid growth of incomes for people. So when you hear about the delights of liberalization that followed, you should always remember that the 50s and 60s and the 70s were unique years in terms of income growth and equality and so on. That's the context in which the import substituting industrialization theory prevailed among development theorists. It was the characteristic approach. And in that context, what also happened was that foreign aid for development became very important. Why? What cast your mind to it? Capital doesn't flow freely because controls stop it from doing that, as I've already explained. Capital doesn't flow. There is no such thing as a global capital market which now dominates everything, didn't exist. If capital doesn't flow freely and you put yourself in the shoes of a developing country, then as soon as the development process starts is about lined it, or as prebiased would have outlined it, imports might grow. If imports grow and exports don't grow commensurately, the country will have a problem because it will have a balance of trade deficits and someone has to finance a deficit. Capital must come from somewhere in order to finance a deficit. So if you really want to continue with the process of rapid investment, which means imports, which means a deficit, someone has to be financing the deficit. And that meant foreign aid. So that's the context in which foreign aid was then, back then discussed as a vital element of development policy. And that's how the World Bank began to be thought of back in the day. That's presumably something that the World Bank had to do. That's how the 50s, the 60s and the 70s functioned, not particularly successfully for developing countries incidentally. Growth process was not particularly strong and some development theorists, especially those who came from the Marxist tradition, began to talk of the development and the development. In other words, as this was happening, certain groups of countries were becoming entrenched in low development. So the world was splitting into this developed core, and then underdeveloped periphery. That was the state of affairs until the 70s. What happened in the 70s was of dramatic importance. And in a sense, we continue to live in the same period. That's basically, we haven't actually come out of the period that began in the 70s. And what happened in the 70s was of course a major series of major crises in the developed world, lower crisis of the 70s and before crisis are followed afterwards. The end of Gange isn't basically, and the rise of, in a sense, neoliberalism. The idea that the state has got no business in economic affairs, and it must withdraw, and it must simply act as a night watchman. I'm simplifying again, but I want to convey the main idea. For developing countries, this was of decisive importance. It was of decisive importance in the field of theory, but also in the field of practice. In the field of theory, which is, which matters to us because you have to be taught is, what happened was neoclassical economics began to notice the development process. Until then, they were not terribly interested in neoclassical economists. They were not terribly interested in development economics. But in the 70s, they began to look at it more closely. And you began to get neoclassical treatments, mainstream treatments for the development process. And of course, as neoclassicals always do, the thing that they noticed was that there was something which was very clearly absent from the analysis of, say, the Latin American structuralists and all the others, political economists and others who discussed the development process in the way that they summed up for you before. And that was, of course, price. And price is the key economic variable for neoclassical economists, right? Economics is about price. What the term is price and how. But price was absent in the structuralist process. What mattered to structuralists and others was the structure. In other words, agriculture, industry, the international sector, how they interact with each other, the flows and so on. Price wasn't very important there. And neoclassical said, no, that cannot be. That's not right. Price is what's key. And obviously if you start with that, then you go down a very different path because if you go down that road, the neoclassical economics lies to go down. Price is very important because price ensures the efficient allocation of resources if price is freely determined. The analysis of demand and supply tells you precisely this. If demand and supply are freely determined for by market agents, then that's the optimal allocation of resources. And not just of the good that we're talking about, but also of the factors of production that went into the production of the good. Okay, because choices are freely made and agents will make their choices in a rational way and everybody will leave the market happy, equilibrium. So that was the key thing, which meant from that perspective, if you want the development, you have to let prices be determined freely. Let prices find their level. That in a sense is the Washington consensus. If you think about it, that's basically it. If you really wanted to condense it in one sentence. Development will happen when markets operate freely and prices can actually reflect relative scarcities. They can reflect the conditions of economy broadly understood as the agents perceive it and the agents act. Well, the implications were dramatic. Because if that's the thinking, if that's how you approach development policy, you understand that there is no room for development policy. Development policy is basically to upset yourself from development. It is actually to take a backseat and let millions of development theorists get on with it basically. The field in which this emerged first was in finance, hence financial deregulation, financial liberalization. Because obviously the key price in the financial field is the rate of interest. The rate of interest is a price, right? It is the price of borrowing and lending. That was very tightly controlled for decades until the 70s. And the first terrain in which the freeing of prices took place in a big way was in the rate of interest in finance. Let the rate of interest find its level. Now you understand this has got serious implications. Because if you let the rate of interest find its level, that means that you should stop imposing a ceiling on it. You should stop controlling the supply of credit. You should stop inserting yourself in the demand for credit. You should let banks do what they think they should do. You should let people borrow the way they want to borrow. There must not be regulations of quantities of credit and prices of credit. Let them do it. Yeah, but if you let them do it, as we now know, and let them do it any way they like, you will end up with credit bubbles and booms and busts. At the time, this wasn't that clear. But that was the message. So financial deregulation and financial liberalization began in the 70s. Along those lines, it was part of the new development economics operating in finance. And the idea was if you let them do it any way they like, then they will save more. They will invest more. They will find the right level of interest and there will be growth and development. As I say, it didn't quite work out that way, but that was the logic. If you start with interest, you're not gonna stop them. Because obviously if it holds for one market, it holds for another. And so the same idea should also apply to output markets. Why regulate the production of light industry, as the structuralists said. Why regulate the production of consumer groups? Why encourage the output and said, who are you to choose which industries to support? You understand? That was the logic of it. What does the state know? What is the relative advantage of the state in this? Nothing according to the mainstream approach. Therefore the state mustn't do it, deregulate. Deregulate the free markets. So the process of deregulation as policy began in the 70s and gathered speed. Ultimately, you reach the point when capital itself, the flow of capital itself began to be deregulated. Why regulate the flows of capital? Why tell people how they can shift that money from Brazil to Germany? Why let them do it, let them free, let them move the money anyway they like and in both directions. Deregulate, in other words, the capital account, let international flows be free. So financial deregulation led to general deregulation led gradually to the idea of what was called the Washington Consensus gradually. In other words, private is best, market is best, public doesn't work, state control doesn't work. It should be pushed to the limits. This approach, again, I'm simplifying and I'm being unfair to a certain extent that such is the lot of one hour. But I think I'm conveying the gist of it. This approach continues to be, in a sense, the foundation stone. It's the reference point. But obviously, a lot of water has flown under the bridge, has flown under the bridge since the early 70s and we now know that this mechanism can fail to produce development. It can also produce crisis and we also know theoretically that these markets that are supposed to find a level of price that is natural to them can also malfunction. We know that markets fail. And markets fail because of a variety of reasons, transactions costs and information asymmetries and a host of other factors that might stop them from functioning in the way in which the theory would argue that they should function or that they do function. And therefore, if that's the case, intervention is again necessary because if markets malfunction, then how would you fix the malfunction when you need an authority to do it? That's the way in which critiques of the Washington consensus began to emerge in theory about 20 years ago. But the dominant approach remains, as I said, the Washington consensus. I can say a lot more about that and if you come to source, you will hear a lot more about it in a more reasonable pace with a more reasonable pace. But the point I want to stress finally is this. All that has been happening while real changes have been taking place underneath as well, not just in theory, but in practice. And of course, the biggest change is Asia, right? East Asia in particular, Korea, Japan originally, but then Korea a whole host of countries in Southeast Asia and of course the elephant in the room, right? China, which is where the biggest transformation is taking place. And that has happened the last 40 years. To a certain extent, this has happened because of markets, production for markets. Anyone who tells you though that this confirms the neoliberal, let them free, let them do it. Approach to development would be lying to you because that's not how China developed and that's not how most of these economies developed. It's a peculiar mix of policy that obtained there. Yes, depending on market, but also depending heavily on the state and state control over key areas of the economy to do with the fundamental goods inputs into the production process. And also of course, the financial system which has never been let free in China. This has posed new issues and new questions for development economics. And that is again something which you will be discussing and learning more about it. So together with the crisis prone nature of this and the new inequalities that emerged. Now, I don't wanna say anything much more. My cutie aware of time is 10 too. So I think I've said enough to give you a flavor of how we do things here. Perhaps I should give you the opportunity to ask some questions. I would freely encourage that. And also to say that certainly in my courses and in my lectures interaction is highly valued and that's how we operate. I keep asking questions and I keep inviting questions from my students. So there you go, five minutes to ask all the burning questions you've got and to sort out all the problems of the world economy. Thank you so much. And Shanzana's been doing a wonderful job holding down the floor on the Q&A. We've had a couple of questions come in and everybody should be able to see that if they navigate on the Q&A panel to the answered questions. You'll be able to see the questions that were submitted and Shanzana's responses but there's been a lot of questions about quantitative elements of the course and the maths background that might perhaps be useful for students and different things there. Costas, if you want to pick up on any of that as well. I can't see the questions. I can see one question by Claire. Yeah. Claire McCulloch. And then if you go at the top to answered there should be open, answered, and... Oh, okay, I can see them now. If you click on answered you'll be able to see all the ones that you've responded to. Very good. Okay, so let me ask these questions. The quant element. Now, we will teach you econometrics and quantitative techniques. There are courses that do it at the standard level for us in the advanced level. We will teach you microeconometics and macroeconometics. You will be competent at using packages and engaging in standard econometric techniques that economics uses. You'll be good at reading and assessing papers and using the techniques yourself. And that will be integrated into the general discussion of theory. We do not fetishize technique here at SOS. We'll give you an advanced level but we integrated with the rest of the stuff that we do. You will learn to assess models and to reproduce models and to work with the econometrics test models. And that's good enough for us and for the SOS economists who we want you to be. Now, for MS economics the focus is slightly different obviously. It's not development per se. It is a critical perspective on economic theory. It is actually more model focus and focus more on the advanced countries as well. You can have options there too. You will have options. You can take some development courses as part of your options for that. But you have to make a decision for yourself where you want the emphasis to lie. In terms of area focus we have historically and still do emphasize area specialization. We've got people who know particular areas very well at SOS. And they know the areas not simply as data sets but they know the history, the language and so on of these areas. And you can and you will be encouraged to look at Africa, to look at China depending on what is of interest to you. There are these courses that you can take. Area specialization is also very important for us when it comes to your dissertation. The dissertation for us can be a fairly open-ended thing. You can do a quantitative exercise. You can apply because econometrics to some data that you will gather yourself or that you'll find from some other source. You can do a development of a model. You can do a critical review of the literature. You can do a political economy discussion in a particular country. It's open-ended for us. And there you would be encouraged to have an area focus. It is always sensible to have an area focus which would stand you in good stead when you look at when you finish and you look for jobs. So you'd be able to say, my dissertation is on some aspect of Africa or of African economies, for instance. So it's an Asian economy. In Latin American economies are also acceptable, increasingly. That's about it really. I don't know if there are any questions that have left out of I. We probably have time to answer one more question and then we'll have to end the session. There's a couple of open questions in the first tab. Kostas, if you go up to the top and click over to open, you'll see three that haven't been answered yet. Perhaps if you want to choose one of those and I will pop your email in the chat so that if anyone wants to follow up, they can get in touch with you. Okay, I'll just say very quickly. I'll just say the part-time students know that's basically the same thing. You can shift the courses a little bit about. In other words, instead of doing four and four, which is the usual, the normal split would be four and four. Four in the first year, four in the second. You can do three and five and then answer the circumstances. But I wouldn't encourage that unless you've got good reasons for it. Other than that, you just follow the same process as anybody else over two years. And on the question about applying insights into policy and so on and what career services are available as well as policy and applying the theory to policies, obviously something you will learn from us. That's what we pay attention to. That's why we do economics the way I sum them up. So yes, policy applications are crucial to us. In terms of career, at the MSc level, and again, I'm not blowing my own trumpet, at the MSc level, the quality of source students is world level. The students will get that excellence. We can compete with anybody at that level. So the mix of students is excellent and the career paths that they then have reflect that even in the midst of the pandemic last year, most of our graduates or a lot of our graduates landed incredible jobs. I couldn't believe it actually. I thought they would have great difficulty because of what was happening in the labor market. But no, that's not the case. So typically our graduates will work in the private sector with say big banks or big corporates that want an alternative eye and plenty of those, or with the international multilateral organizations, or they will go back to their own countries and they work in the development field in their own countries. I can say a lot more about that, but I'm aware of time having very short. Yeah, there was one question about the carrier service. So the carrier zone at, I'll just say it very shortly, there is this OS carrier zone who can provide advice on internships, volunteering and they can also help you with interviews. So you can always email them if you need any help regarding your cover letter, CVs, interviews. Perfect, thank you so much. We will have to end the session. I'm sorry, it's a bit abrupt, but we have another one due to start. So I don't want to get cut off. I've popped my email in the chat. Please use that if you have any questions and then we'll make sure that your questions get to the faculty or to anybody that you would like to be pointed in the direction of, but the session will be recorded and available to view in about a week's time. Thank you so much for joining us and do get in touch if we can help you with anything else. Take care everybody. Thank you very much. Thank you to Laurence and Zana for supervising this. Thank you so much. Take care, bye bye. Bye bye now.