The Challenges of Global Poverty
Consider issues posed by massive and persistent global poverty, and explore how economists can contribute to addressing this challenge.
The Challenges of Global Poverty
Consider issues posed by massive and persistent global poverty, and explore how economists can contribute to addressing this challenge.
This is a course for those who are interested in the challenges posed by massive and persistent world poverty, and are hopeful that economists might have something useful to say about this challenge. You will investigate critical questions around the current state of extreme poverty, the daily realities of living in such poverty, hunger, education for the poor, disease burden, the value of microfinance, the importance of property rights, the roles of markets and NGOs in economic development, the impact of foreign aid, and more.
What you'll learn
The course will investigate the following topics:
- Poverty traps and the role of experimentation
- Food and nutrition
- Health care in developing countries
- Education
- Family roles, fertility decisions, and gender discrimination
- Risk and insurance
- Credit, lending, and microfinance
- Saving
- Entrepreneurship
- Institutions and politics
Access the full syllabus here.
Prerequisites
Previous exposure to economics and some familiarity with statistics will be helpful but not critical to understanding the material and learning from the course. Various resources will be available throughout the course for students to learn or refresh on the most important topics.
Course Readiness Check:
This is an introductory course that does not require a readiness check.
Meet your instructors
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Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics -
Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics -
Associate Professor of Economics
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics
Abhijit Banerjee is the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the recipient of many awards, including the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor to many organizations including the World Bank and the government of India.
Esther Duflo
Esther Duflo
Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics
Esther Duflo is the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. She is also the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT. She was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, and at MIT. She has received numerous honors and prizes including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40 in 2010, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2009. She was recognized as one of the best eight young economists by The Economist magazine, one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy since the list exists, and one of the “Forty under 40” most influential business leaders under forty by Fortune magazine in 2010.
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Frank Schilbach
Frank Schilbach
Associate Professor of Economics
Frank Schilbach is an Associate Professor in the MIT Economics Department. He graduated from Harvard with a PhD in Economics in 2015.
His research agenda explores the relationship between poverty and economic behavior by investigating factors associated with poverty, including mental distress, sleep deprivation, and substance abuse. In a second line of research, he study behavioral barriers to the diffusion of information in developing countries. His work advances a broader research agenda that seeks to integrate insights from psychology and related fields into development economics.
Together with Gautam Rao and Heather Schofield, he helps run the Behavioral Development Lab in India. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a faculty affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and an Affiliate at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD).