KETU 2225 - Funding the State in Emerging Economies

The purpose of this course is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of government financing in emerging economies. The course will take students through all technical discussions and critical decisions a Ministry of Finance has to make with regards to deficit financing and debt management, from the macro-level planning of a funding strategy to the execution of financing transactions. Based on a real case, role-playing, and modelling exercises, the class offers a practical approach giving students a tool kit of hard skills necessary to perform economic and financial analyses in a broad range of institutions.

The course will progress step by step and all students should be able to follow, provided that they complete the required readings and prepare each class thoroughly. Some familiarity with notions of international finance, macroeconomics and public finance is an asset. Some in-class exercises will be performed on Excel.

The course will combine lectures, class discussions, small group exercises, students’ presentations and role play.

Students will be evaluated based on various assignments (role play, basic modelling exercises, etc.), in-class presentations and their overall participation. We will pay close attention to the diverse backgrounds of our students and take these into account in our evaluation.

For each class, individually or collectively, students will have detailed assignments: reading background documents, researching information, adding input data in their models or performing simple computations and graphs. At the end of each class, we will provide guidelines to perform future assignments. The workload should not exceed two hours every other week..