BMET 27A40 - Methods and Concepts in Economic History and Development Economics

Although Economic history and Development economics are generally not envisaged as neighboring disciplines, they share in practice a substantial number of key topics, ‘problématiques’ and applied methods. This workshop aims at discussing some of them in details: the experience over time of growth, extractive economies, urbanization, local finance, or the impact of global markets. Each theme will be explored on the basis of one or two articles or book-chapters, some of them classic and other more recent, some with quantitative approach, other without. Advance reading by the students will be absolutely critical for the success of the experimental class.

After two introductory sessions, a first series of readings and discussions with deal with rather ‘micro’ or structural issues of development, that typically lend themselves to applied, local approaches (3-7); then come a series of themes more directly tied to ‘development models’, macro-strategies and global economic governance. A detailed reading list will be circulated later.

List of themes to be studied (provisory):

• West v East: imperialism, colonization, emergence
• Three models of economic development.
• Extractive economies, from Joseph Conrad to Daron Acemoglu
• What do we know about Rural-Urban migrations? Public health
• Land property rights, informality and legal pluralism
• The economics of ‘lemons’ and the comparative approach to local markets
• Credit cooperatives, micro-credit and the judicial system
• Sovereign debt markets and their gate-keepers
• Authoritarian modernization and ‘neo-liberalism’: the Chilean case
• Liberalism, the regulatory state and corporatism: the early 20th c. debate
• International law, 19th c style; extra-territoriality and British hegemony
• Beyond sovereignty: global legal pluralism, ‘party autonomy’ and arbitration