How is development economics taught in developing countries?

ABSTRACT

A survey of instructors and data collected from course syllabi and examinations are used to examine how the subject of development economics is taught at the undergraduate and master's levels in developing countries, compared to undergraduate classes in the United States. Topic coverage, teaching approach, and means of assessment all differ from that in leading U.S. economics departments. Development economics is taught largely as a theoretical subject coupled with case studies in developing countries, with few courses emphasizing use of data or empirical methods. Limited financial resources, the educational level of students, and low involvement of instructors in research are considered as explanations for the way the subject is taught in developing countries. The authors conclude with suggestions for improving teaching of development economics.

KEYWORDS:

• development economics
• undergraduate education

JEL CODES:

• A22
• O10
• I23

Acknowledgments

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers, the associate editor, editor, commentators on a blog post on the Development Impact Blog and Stephen Smith for helpful discussion, and the instructors who participated in our data collection for their contributions.

Notes

1. The blog was created by members of the World Bank's Development Research Group and covers a broad range of issues relating to the modern technique of impact evaluations in development economics. It summarizes and discusses new research papers and presentations held at major development economics conferences, engages in debates in development economics research, and discusses methodological issues in and provides guidance for doing empirical research in development economics.

2. Data from the World Development Indicators.

3. Ideally we would have assessed this hypothesis in more detail, exploring, for instance, how teaching of development economics is associated with the age and place of PhD of instructors, or their workload. The online survey asked instructors for these characteristics, but given the low response to this data collection approach, we lack this information for the majority of our sample. Moreover, not all syllabi we collected do list the instructor, so that we could not contact them for additional information on their backgrounds or match them with publicly available data such as whether they have a Google Scholar profile or their rank on RePEc in case they were a registered author.

4. Not all of the countries in which development economics is taught in English have English as their official language. Courses are taught in English in Albania, China, Congo (DRC), Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, and Uzbekistan.

5. Two such courses in development economics are provided for instance by the Marginal Revolution University (https://www.mruniversity.com/courses/development-economics) and MIT OpenCourseWare (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-771-development-economics-microeconomic-issues-and-policy-models-fall-2008/).

6. http://www.ufrgs.br/redesenv/programas.

7. http://www.cgdev.org/search/syllabus