Adapting Development Economics Courses

Change often happens incrementally and slowly. In the economics textbook market, for example, there is an unwritten rule that new textbooks cannot differ more than roughly 15% from the standard textbook in order to be ‘acceptable’ (Colander, 2003).

While our book clearly breaks this rule and proposes more far-reaching and fundamental changes in most chapters, in this chapter we focus instead on how existing courses could be adjusted incrementally. By doing so, we hope to assist educators in improving and adapting the courses they teach without needing to rip them up and start again, as well as helping students make suggestions for how this could be done.

First, we set out the typical contents of current courses. Second, we provide our suggested additions and changes. It is important to note that we pose all these suggestions as potential sources of inspiration, not a checklist of all the things that necessarily should be included. After all, there is a practical limit to what can be taught within a single course.

Courses:

A key ingredient of development economics courses are mathematical models of economic growth, such as the Solow, Ramsey and AK models. But while significant parts of development economics courses are devoted to teaching neoclassical theoretical models, it is often less dominant than in other courses. Many courses also devote attention to discussing history, debates about policy questions, and real world knowledge related to today’s main world problems. With this a broad range of topics are discussed, from poverty and inequality to industrialisation, urbanisation, education, institutions, finance, trade and globalisation.

Frequently used textbooks:

A good amount of development economics courses already devote teaching time to real world knowledge by including case studies, discussing how institutions such as the IMF and World Bank work, and examining core societal issues such as poverty and hunger. We applaud this and encourage teachers to extend the real world knowledge that they teach students by including more in-depth discussions of key societal problems and institutions, both global and local. 

For more detail, see Building Block 2: Know Your Own Economy and Building Block 9: Problems & Proposals.

While it is important to decolonise our thinking in every field, it is perhaps particularly important in the field of development economics. Important local, or national, thinkers on development should thus be treated as seriously as those appearing in the pages of standard textbooks. Within development economics, a key debate is between those who believe in a passive state and free trade, and those who argue for an active state and (infant industry) protection. These ideas find much of their origins in classical political economy and the historical school, but have also been further developed by economists using different approaches. Another important topic in development economics is institutions. Many economists have analysed which economic, political and social institutions best enable or preclude economic development. Finally, there are many other theories and ideas about economic development, coming from a wide range of approaches, such as ecological, behavioral, structuralist, and evolutionary economics. Students could benefit from becoming familiar with these ideas as well, even if only in a rough manner given the time constraints. 

For more detail, see the section Economic Development in the background material Pragmatic Pluralism.

Teaching Materials

Institutions are a crucial aspect of development economics. The current teaching about institutions, which often has a neoclassical (or new institutional) focus on property rights and market mechanisms, could be enriched by looking more specifically at the complex institutional set-up of the (national or local) economy and institutional variety around the world. Just like our theoretical thinking needs to be decolonised, the way we understand how economies are, and can be, organised needs to be decolonised. There are many forms of economic organisation that are currently too often ignored in economics education. We therefore advise teachers to devote time to these other organisational forms, and in particular those that are locally prevalent/relevant. This knowledge will help students better understand how economies are currently organised as well as how they could be organised in the future.

For more detail, see Foundations 5: Diversifying and decolonising economics, as well as Building Block 5: Economic Organizations & Mechanisms and Building Block 6: Political-Economic Systems. 

Teaching Materials

Development is a highly important topic of debate that is characterised by a substantial amount of normative contestation. Many debates revolve around how to best and ethically achieve economic development, but others revolve about what the goal of economic development amounts to. This relates to debates about aiming for GDP growth, ecological sustainability, and human wellbeing, and the (in)compatibility of these. 

Furthermore, some argue we should not use the term ‘development’ because it presumes the global North, or western countries, are ‘advanced’ while the global South, or non-western countries, are considered ‘backward’. As such, they argue that the concept of development inherently reflects Western-Northern hegemony and justifies rich countries telling ‘developing’ countries how to behave. These ideas are often referred to as post-development and decolonial/postcolonial theory, and have inspired institutions such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). As an alternative to the uniform policies designed by global technocratic institutions, they propose to start from local practices and design policy with the help of grassroots movements and direct democracy.

For more detail, see Foundations 5: Diversifying and Decolonising Economics as well as Building Block 1: Introducing the Economy and Building Block 10: Economics for a Better World. 

Teaching Materials

Many courses on development economics already include some history. We encourage teachers to continue doing so and devote more teaching time to this. It can be particularly useful to focus on the history of the country and region in which the course is taught and compare this to other cases. In this way, students learn more about economic history and development in general, but also about the particularities of the country they live in and will likely work in in the future.

For more detail, see Building Block 3: Economic History and Building Block 4: History of Economic Thought & Methods.

Teaching Materials

To create space for the above suggested additions, we advise to focus more on the key ideas and intuitions behind the taught models and devote less teaching time to their technicalities and mathematics. As teaching students to reproduce and work through mathematical models often takes up a large part of the teaching time, this would give the teachers the opportunity to devote more time to practical knowledge, the relevance, institutions, and history. Furthermore, a more even balance between neoclassical economics and other economic approaches could be achieved by decreasing the number of neoclassical ideas and models that are taught.