In Depth
Introduction
The field of development economics has witnessed important shifts in the past decade and the ESD group has followed these directions closely. The reorientation of international development policy from structural adjustment and macroeconomic stability as the most important goals towards poverty reduction as the central objective has created the need to analyze the effect of macroeconomic shocks and policy reform on income distribution.
This shift has had topical and methodological implications and has forced academics and policy makers to think about so-called pro-poor or shared growth strategies and their trade-offs as compared with pure growth strategies. Such strategies can include:
• trade policies or
• exchange rate policies
2. Interventions on a much smaller scale:
• micro-credit programmes or
• conditional cash transfer programmes aimed at improving children’s education and health.
Much progress has been made in analyzing the distributional impact of broader economy-wide policies by constructing sophisticated macroeconomic models, such as CGE models and combining them with micro-simulation tools.
Teaching and research
Staff of ESD has contributed and still contributes to this line of teaching and research. ESD also has outstanding expertise in:
• analyzing the impact of political instability and conflict on macro and micro economic outcomes
• the conflict mitigating effects of trade
• the impact evaluation of policy interventions on a smaller scale.
For instance, using controlled and natural experiments, ESD staff has evaluated health, education and labour market interventions in Argentina, India, Indonesia and Western Africa.
ESD staff is responsible for the Development Studies Major in Economics of Development (ECD). The programme offers a balanced view of macro and micro economic development issues and focuses on applied policy-relevant research.
The programme includes:
• sound training in economic theory,
• a number of courses on quantitative methods - micro-econometrics, time series analysis and macro-economic modelling.
An integral part of the MA programme is a research paper which is expected to demonstrate the ability of students to conduct policy-relevant empirical research.
The micro-economic programme of the major in development economics was recently reshaped and includes a remedial course, an introductory course and an advanced course.
The advanced course discusses topical issues at a theoretical and empirical level. This includes:
• microeconomics of agricultural households,
• household decision making on education and health issues,
• firms and institutions.
The macro-economic programme will also be reorganized giving more attention to trade, monetary and financial economics. The macro and micro perspectives will be closely linked by emphasizing the micro foundations of modern macro economic theory and by discussing microeconomic issues such as agricultural production, education investment or firms’ technology adoption in a general equilibrium framework wherever appropriate.
ESD staff also contribute to MA specializations in the areas of:
• poverty analysis,
• rural development and population,
• environment,
• conflict and
• development policy.
ESD staff contributes to the PhD programme which operates within the Dutch research school in development studies - CERES. This involvement is important as it integrates teaching on development issues between different Universities and Institutes in the Netherlands and therefore can also create valuable research links for doctoral students and staff.
Finally ESD staff contributes to the diploma programme International Health and Policy Evaluation (IHPE) which is offered jointly with other faculties at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
