Suspended in 2025/26
DV592      Half Unit
Economic Development Policy III: Government Policy Analysis

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course explores key issues in government policies in developing countries. The course will draw on specific examples chosen from development cases worldwide to learn which policies have worked, which ones have not, and how a rigorous analysis of these experiences can inform the design of better economic development policies in the future. It begins introducing concepts from public economics to discuss the scope and impacts of government interventions. In particular, the course will cover issues related to market failures, redistribution, public goods and externalities. The course will also discuss theoretical and empirical work on the economic consequences of government interventions, with particular focus economic incidence, efficiency trade-offs and unintended consequences of policies. In the second part, it focuses on challenges in raising government revenue and delivering public service in the developing world context, where limited state and fiscal capacity impose important constraints in policymaking. Beyond these topics, the course will provide background on relevant analytical tools in quantitative research, and develop skills to interpret empirical evidence in development economics.

Coursework will include a combination of class discussions, problem sets, presentations and computer-lab based sessions for students to explore programming and statistical skills.

Students are strongly encouraged to take DV491/591, as a highly complementary course that will also apply the empirical methods taught in DV490/590 to topics in Human Development, Institutions and Markets, Social Networks, Economic History and Cultural Economics, and Behavioural Economics and Development Policy Design.

15 hours of seminars and 20 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars in the WT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the WT.

1. Alatas, V., Purnamasari, R., Wai-Poi, M., Banerjee, A., Olken, B. A., & Hanna, R. (2016). “Self-targeting: Evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia.” Journal of Political Economy, 124(2), 371-427.
2. Baird, Sarah, Craig McIntosh, and Berk Özler. "Cash or condition? Evidence from a cash transfer experiment." The Quarterly journal of economics 126, no. 4 (2011): 1709-1753.
3. Bandiera, O. , Prat, A. and Valletti, T. 2009. "Active and Passive Waste in Government Spending: Evidence from a Policy Experiment." American Economic Review, 99(4): 1278-1308.
4. Besley, T. and Ghatak. 2004. “Public Goods and Economic Development”. in Policies for Poverty Alleviation (ed.) Abhijit Banerjee, Roland Benabou, and Dilip Mookherjee.
5. Chetty, R and Looney, A (2005) "Income Risk and the Benefits of Social Insurance: Evidence from Indonesia and the United States" in Ito, T and Rose, A K, Fiscal Policy and Management in East Asia, NBER-EASE, Volume 16, University of Chicago Pres.
6. Gruber. J. 1994. “The Incidence of Mandated Maternity Benefits,” American Economic Review, 84(3), 622-641.
7. Miguel, Edward, and Michael Kremer. 2004. "Worms: identifying impacts on education and health in the presence of treatment externalities." Econometrica 72.1: 159-217.
8. Jensen, Anders. 2022. "Employment Structure and the Rise of the Modern Tax System." American Economic Review, 112 (1): 213-34.
9. Pomeranz, Dina. 2015. "No Taxation without Information: Deterrence and Self-Enforcement in the Value Added Tax." American Economic Review, 105(8): 2539-69.
10. Weigel, J.L., 2020. The participation dividend of taxation: How citizens in Congo engage more with the state when it tries to tax them. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(4), pp.1849-1903.

Essay (100%, 5000 words)