Training activities
Professional training on natural resource taxation and natural resource revenue management at IMF course at CEF Kuwait, NRGI courses in Accra, Budapest, Istanbul, Yaounde.
Hackathons on extractive data use in Harare, Lagos, London and Washington, D.C.
Teaching development economics to undergraduate and graduate students at ELTE University and Rajk College in Budapest.
Syllabus on Development Economics
2019/20 Rajk College
I developed the following syllabus for the weekly evening seminars I hold with Rajk College (Budapest) students. The aim of the course is to encourage participants to reflect on major challenges in international development, and familiarize students with some of the key trends, research findings and contemporary debates in development economics. The course is geared to six to eight undergraduate or graduate students in social sciences or economics. Participants are required to read course material carefully ahead of seminars, arrive prepared with questions, carry out data tasks in pairs. Seminars take the form of a guided discussions based on the reading alongside short interventions (presenting data task results, explaining complex concepts, summarizing additional material). There are 14 seminars per semester, held for two hours on a weekly basis.
1. Measuring development and poverty- stylized facts
Sen, Amartya (1998). “The Concept of Development,” Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 1.
Rodrik, Dani, (2014), The Past, Present, and Future of Economic Growth, Challenge, 57, issue 3, p. 5-39,
Ref: Deaton, Angus (2013): The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origin of Inequality, Princeton University Press (1st chapter)
Extra: Hans Rosling video: The best stats you’ve ever seen.
Data task: Has the world become a better place in the last 50 years? Find indicators where we are backsliding. Data: UN SDG, WB WDI.
2. Neoclassical theory of growth, Convergence and divergence
Debraj Ray (1998): Development Economics, Princeton University Press. 3rd chapter
Alwyn Young (1993): Lessons from the East Asian NICS: A Contrarian View
Ref: Sala-i-Martin, Xavier, (1997). "I Just Ran Two Million Regressions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(2), pages 178-183, May.
Data task: Decomposing growth trajectories by factors of production. Countries: China, Ethopia, South Korea. Data: Penn World Tables.
3. Competing theories of economic backwardness: Institutions and geography
Acemoglu, Daron (2012): Why nations fail (1. chapter) or Acemoglu & Johnson & Robinson: Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, AER, 2001
Sachs, Jeffrey. (2003), “Institutions Don’t Rule: Direct Effects of Geography on Per Capita Income.” NBER Working Paper 9490
Ref: Alsan, Marcella (2015) : The Effect of the TseTse Fly on African Development. American Economic Review.
Ref 2: Acemoglu and Johnson (2007): Disease and Development: The Effect of Life Expectancy on Economic Growth. Journal of Political Economy.
Extra: CGP Grey video summary on Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel.
Data task: How can you measure the quality of institutions? Diving into the correlations across various governance indicators. (Quality of Government dataset)
4. Schooling and learning
Eric Hanushek – Lhudger Woessmann: Schooling, Cognitive Skills, and the Latin American Growth Puzzle
Esther Duflo. (2000): The medium run effects of educational expansion: evidence from a large school construction program in Indonesia
Bold, Tessa & Kimenyi, Mwangi & Mwabu, Germano & Ng’ang’a, Alice & Sandefur, Justin. (2018): Experimental evidence on scaling up education reforms in Kenya. Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 168(C), pages 1-20.
Ref: Duflo, Esther, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer. 2015. "Education, HIV, and Early Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Kenya." American Economic Review, 105 (9): 2757-97.
Data task: Suggest new (hypothetical) indicators of learning measuring responsiveness to latest technologies and challenges they pose.
5. Health
Kremer, Michael and Edward Miguel (2004). “Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities.” Econometrica 72(1): 159–217.
Banerjee, Abhijit, and Esther Duflo. (2011): Poor Economics – Chapter 3 Low-Hanging Fruit for Better (Global) Health?
Extra: Clemens and Sandefur: Mapping the Worm Wars: What the Public Should Take Away from the Scientific Debate about Mass Deworming - Center for Global Development blog
Data task: Review one of the top charities in the GiveWell database of top charitable interventions. What is most attractive and most worrying in donating to them? Data: GiveWell.org
6. Population and Malthusian trap
Malthus, Thomas (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population - 1. and 2. chapter
CORE ECON textbook - Unit 2 - technology, population and growth.
Galor, O., and David N. Weil, (1996): Gender gap, fertility and Growth, American Economic Review, 86 .
Data task: Review demographic trends for a selected developing country: fertility rate, birth rate, death rate, population growth. What is relationship between variables? Was there a demographic transition in the past? Create your own projection unti 2050. Countries: Iran, China, Taiwan, Nigeria. Source: WB WDI, UN Population Statistics.
7. Industrialization
Blattman, Christopher, and Stefan Dercon. (2016) Occupational choice in early industrializing societies: Experimental evidence on the income and health effects of industrial and entrepreneurial work. No. w22683. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016.
Hausmann R, Hwang J. Rodrik D, (2007) What You Export Matters. Journal of Econ Growth
Rodrik D. (2013) Structural Change, Fundamentals, and Growth: An Overview/
Extra: Paul Krugman - In Praise of Cheap Labor (Slate)
Data task: How did the export patterns change over time? When did structural transformation occure? Countries: China, South Korea, Singapore. Source:MIT Observatory of Economic Complexity
8. Rent seeking and corruption
Murphy, Kevin M., Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny. 1993. “Why Is Rent-Seeking So Costly to Growth?” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 83 (May): 409-414.
Caselli F., and Michaels, G. (2013) “Do oil windfalls improve living standards? Evidence from Brazil,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics . 51, (2013): 208-38.
Extra: Daron Acemoglu : What Bill Gates Got Wrong About Why Nations Fail.(FP) & Ricardo Hausmann.“Fighting Corruption Won’t End Poverty” (Project Syndicate)
9. Resource curse
Sachs, Jeffrey – Warner Andrew (2001): “The curse of natural resources”. European Economic Review 45(4-6): 827-838.
Halvor Mehlum & Karl Moene & Ragnar Torvik, 2006."Institutions and the Resource Curse,". Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 116(508), pages 1-20, January.
Ref: Ross, Michael L. “Oil, Islam, and Women.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 102, no. 1, 2008, pp. 107–123.
Extra: Big Men (full-length documentary)
Data task: How did the 2014 commodity price shock impact the economy of various oil producers? (using pre-assembled IMF WEO dataset).
10. Aid
William Easterly (2009): Can the West save Africa? Journal of Economic Literature
Hristos Doucouliagos & Martin Paldam (2007): The Aid Effectiveness Literature: The Sad Results of 40 Years of Research. Journal of Economic Surveys.
Data task: Which countries do major donors give the most aid to per capita? Donors: US, UK, France, China. Data: OECD DAC, AidData (China)
11. Cash for the poor
Abhijit Banerjee - Dean Karlan - Jonathan Zinman (2015): Six Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit: Introduction and Further Steps, AEJ-AE.
Johannes Haushofer – Jeremy Shapiro (2016): The short-term impact of unconditional cash transfers to the poor: experimental evidence from kenya, QJE.
Extra: Blogs by Berk Ozler on the results of H-S 2018 update.
Data task:Digging into the short term impacts of cash transfers across treatment, spillover and pure control group. (using the Haushofer –Shapiro data file).
12. Migration
Clemens, Michael (2011): Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? Journal of Economic Perspectives
Özden, Caglar, Christopher Parsons, Maurice Schiff, and Terrie Walmsley (2011), “Where on Earth is Everybody? The Evolution of Global Bilateral Migration 1960-2000”, The World Bank Economic Review.
Ref: David Card (1990): The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market. ILR Review.
Data task: Push and pull factors in migration. (source: Özden et al 2011 database)
13. Civil war
Collier, Paul – Hoeffler, Anke (2004): „Greed and Grievance in Civil War”. Oxford Economic Papers 56: 563-595.
Miguel, Edward, Shanker Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti. 2004. "Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: An Instrumental Variables Approach." . Journal of Political Economy 112 (4): 725-753.
Ref: Blattman, Christopher & Jamison, Julian & Sheridan, Margaret. (2017). Reducing Crime and Violence: Experimental Evidence from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Liberia. American Economic Review. 107.
14. Climate change
Richard Tol (2018). The Economic Impacts of Climate Change, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2018
Joyce J. Chen and Valerie Muller, Coastal climate change, soil salinity and human migration in Bangladesh. Nature Climate Change 8(16) · November 2018
Ref: Gregory Casey, Soheil Shayegh, Juan Moreno-Cruz, Martin Bunzl, Oded Galor, and Ken Caldeira (2019): The impact of climate change on fertility
Environmental Research Letters, 2019
15. Closing session
Lucy Page and Rohini Pande (2018): Ending Global Poverty: Why Money Isn't Enough. Journal of Economic Perspectives 32(4):173-200
Extra: Bill Gates, Chris Blattman and Lant Pritchett: Chickens vs Cash Transfer vs Growth Accelerations (VOX, CGD blog).
Ref: One participant reads the paper and summarizes it to other participants. Extra: Press articles or videos.