Development Economics

The World Bank estimates that ~670 million people are living below a threshold of "extreme poverty" (less than ~$1.90 per day). In 2015, 193 of 195 of the world's governments endorsed the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal #1: “to eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere by 2030”. With supply-chain disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and grain shortages due to the war in Ukraine, this ambitious objective has been made no less complex.

Understanding what causes extreme poverty - and (most importantly) how to get people out of extreme poverty, is a central goal of development policy and a primary focus for researchers in the field of development economics.

I will aim to (i) outline some of the basic theories of the field (e.g., what is a poverty trap?); (ii) introduce some of the methods used to identify what works to get people out of poverty (e.g., what is a randomized control trial and how is success evaluated?); (iii) present some of the basic findings from recent work in development economics.