Economics

From a political science perspective, this course investigates the stark material inequalities that exist between countries and world regions. It covers the transnational political-economy processes that shape inequalities within and between countries, including perspectives on the winners and losers of global trade, the deregulation of global finance, the precarity created along global production chains, tax evasion of multinational companies, migration, and the rise of global tech companies. The course reflects on the consequences of these processes for areas such as democracy, gender relations, and climate change.

This course offers an advanced study of macroeconomics. Topics include: macroeconomic modeling; formal analysis of dynamics; uncertainty in macroeconomics; fiscal and monetary policy; dynamics of debt and deficit; the role of credibility and expectations.

Over the past centuries, economics has changed from a largely verbal discipline that studied human agency in commercial settings, to a mathematical discipline that incorporates scientific instruments such as statistics and laboratory practices. This course retraces this past and to see how modern economics emerged to its present form. Students assess the development of economic ideas, theories, and methods in their appropriate historical context with emphasize on incisive change of the economic discipline from the interwar to the post-war period. The primary objective is to enable students to historically assess the merits and limitations of contemporary economics in addressing major economic and social questions. 
 

This course critiques the popular narrative of "growth" and "development" globally. It reviews various criticisms of global growth with an emphasis on the most radical, considering whether infinite growth is desirable, in order to better understand the ecological, social, and political issues at stake.