DV469      Half Unit
The Political Economy of Development

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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Why are some countries rich and others poor? Why are some governed well and others badly? This course employs a political economy approach to examine the causes of development, identify the underlying obstacles to development, and evaluate potential solutions. It focuses on the principles governing the institutions, politics, and organisations through which policies, programmes and projects are produced and implemented.  Attention is given to the different kinds of authority, incentives and accountability mechanisms that govern the relationships between leaders, managers and recipients. It reviews ongoing debates about the best ways of designing state agencies, private firms and NGOs, by showing how centralised bureaucracies, markets, participatory and solidaristic agencies operate to provide services in practice. It explores how social, political and economic forces interact to drive change and stability. In order to enable students to make practical judgments about institutional reform programmes in various contexts, competing approaches to development are critically and constructively analyzed in light of case studies.

On completing the course students should be able to:

(i) use theory to identify the causes of actual development challenges, (ii) identify and assess relevant case study material to inform development practice; and (iii) employ the insights developed throughout the course to formulate policy recommendations and plans of action for improving development.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars and workshops in the AT. Seminars will be 90 minutes long and lectures will be 120 minutes long.

Students are expected to attend all these sessions. Lectures will focus on the theoretical debates driving current policy practice in the development community, while seminars will relate these to practical problems of implementation, drawing on case studies, class exercises, and the personal experience of participants. Seminars will discuss topics covered in the lecture, and will be conducted on the basis either of a student presentation or a class exercise.

In the Autumn Term, all students are expected to produce one short essay on the readings of a particular week, to prepare them for the final exam.  

A detailed weekly reading list is provided at the first course meeting. Background readings include:

• Acemoglu, Daron and James Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. New York: Crown.
• Auerbach, Adam. 2019. Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Easterly, William. 2002. The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics: Economists Adventures and Misadventure in the Tropics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Faguet, Jean-Paul. 2012. Decentralization and Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in Bolivia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Kohli, Atul. 2004. State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
• Tang, Shiping. 2022. The Institutional Foundations of Economic Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Exam (85%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Presentation (15%)