Curriculum Development Economics
Development Economics
Why some countries are rich and others poor, how poverty is measured, and what the evidence says about the policies that help people escape it.
- Counting the World's Poor: Global Poverty Lines and Multidimensional Poverty How the World Bank's international poverty line compares poverty across countries, and why many economists also measure poverty through health, schooling and living conditions. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Human Development Index How the United Nations ranks countries by health, education and income together, and what that combined score reveals that income alone does not. 📄 Read-aloud
- Why Are Some Countries Rich and Others Poor? The main competing explanations for the vast income gaps between nations, from geography and history to institutions and culture. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Foreign Aid Debate: Big Pushes, Planners and Searchers The main schools of thought on how rich countries should help poor ones, and the practical questions of how aid is delivered, tied and spent. 📄 Read-aloud
- Microfinance Around the World: The Promise and the Evidence How small loans to poor entrepreneurs became a global movement, and what careful studies later found about their real effects. 📄 Read-aloud
- Remittances as a Force for Development How money sent home by migrant workers compares with aid and investment, what it does for families and countries, and the debates it raises. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Informal Economy and the Dual Economy Why most workers in developing countries work outside formal jobs, and the competing theories of how economies move from informal to formal work. 📄 Read-aloud
- Conditional Cash Transfers How programs that pay poor families on the condition that children attend school and visit clinics spread from Mexico and Brazil to much of the world. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Green Revolution: A Global Story How high-yielding crop varieties transformed food production across Latin America and Asia, why Africa's experience differed, and what the episode teaches about technology and development. 📄 Read-aloud
- Infrastructure and Development: Roads, Power and Phones How roads, electricity, water and mobile phones connect poor households to markets and opportunities, and why building infrastructure well is harder than it looks. 📄 Read-aloud
- Health, Nutrition and Development Why healthier, better-nourished people drive development, illustrated by deworming, micronutrients, bed nets and the lasting effects of early childhood nutrition. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Middle-Income Trap Why many countries grow quickly out of poverty but then stall before reaching high income, and what it takes to keep climbing. 📄 Read-aloud
- The East Asian Growth Miracle How Japan, the four Asian Tigers and later China grew faster than any economies before them, and the debate over what really drove their success. 📄 Read-aloud
- Property Rights and Land Titles in Development How secure land ownership can encourage investment and borrowing, the famous argument of Hernando de Soto, and what evidence shows. 📄 Read-aloud
- Clean Water and Sanitation Why access to safe water and toilets has large economic and health benefits, and what India's Swachh Bharat Mission achieved. 📄 Read-aloud
- Poverty Traps: Do They Exist? The idea that poor people or countries can get stuck in poverty through self-reinforcing cycles, and what evidence says about escaping them. 📄 Read-aloud
- Graduation Programmes for the Ultra-Poor How giving the poorest households an asset, training, support and a small stipend helped many escape extreme poverty, based on BRAC's model and multi-country trials. 📄 Read-aloud