An undergraduate course in development economics presents an ideal opportunity to introduce students to the importance of gender differences in economic outcomes. The authors of this article argue that a systematic integration of gender into development economics courses based on standard textbooks is feasible and desirable. They provide a…

The author of this article describes an intermediate economics course structured around outside readings, which include academic journal papers, policy briefs, and news articles. Students complete low-stakes, high-frequency writing assignments that promote accountability and encourage critical thinking about the readings. This pairing of outside…

Film and video clips have been used in the classroom to bring economic concepts to life. The authors use the 2015 film "Joy" to animate Joseph Schumpeter's "The Theory of Economic Development," a foundational text on the theory of innovation and entrepreneurship that remains relevant for students today. They outline…

The authors describe an innovative active learning strategy for a course on the economics of developing countries--a project designing a small-scale economic development project. Student teams research issues faced by developing countries and identify a specific problem in a specific locale. Students then create a detailed, feasible plan to…

In economic development and other economics electives, students regularly encounter economic measures of absolute and relative deprivation, from poverty measures like the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke index to measures of distribution like the Gini index. By "doing economics," students practice applying economic measurement to real-world data…

A survey of instructors and data collected from course syllabi and examinations are used to examine how the subject of development economics is taught at the undergraduate and master's levels in developing countries, compared to undergraduate classes in the United States. Topic coverage, teaching approach, and means of assessment all differ from…

A central theme of this article is that economics instructors should spend more time teaching about economic growth and development at the undergraduate level because the topic is of interest to students, is less abstract than other macroeconomic topics, and is the focus of exciting research in economics. Facts and data can be presented to…

This article comes in three parts. Part 1 reviews a few pertinent facts about the stunning economic events that have occurred in the United States (and elsewhere) since 2007. The author chose these particular facts from among many for their relevance to the rest of the article. The next two parts take up, first, some of the key lessons that…

In this article, the authors discuss a unique project carried out by 13 teams of four students each in the undergraduate Development Economics class during the 2012 spring semester at a private liberal arts college. The goal of the "Dream Experiment" was to think of an idea that promotes development, employs concepts from development…

The critical roles of entrepreneurs in creating, operating, and destroying markets, as well as their importance in driving long-term economic growth are still generally either absent from principles of economics texts or relegated to later chapters. The primary difficulties in explaining entrepreneurship at the principles level are the lack of a…

"Development economics" was the study of how to create the plumbing that would allow developing economies to become developed. The financial crisis leads us to question whether industrialized countries have the plumbing problem solved and thus leads us to question whether we need a development economics that is separate from macroeconomics.…

General equilibrium models now play important roles in many fields of economics including tax policy, environmental regulation, international trade, and economic development. The intermediate microeconomics classroom has not kept pace with these trends, however. Microeconomics textbooks primarily focus on the insights that can be drawn from the…

Since January 2000, the authors have experimented with an integrated community-based research-education-service model that combined (1) funded research into the local economic effects of the University of Vermont; (2) a sequence of four semester-long courses to conduct the research and to implement and evaluate key findings; and (3) a…

The author combines the supply and demand model of taxes with a Cournot model of bribe takers to develop a simple and useful framework for understanding the effect of corruption on economic activity. There are many examples of corruption in both developed and developing countries. Because corruption decreases the level of economic activity and…

The author has chosen three major topics in development economics for a discussion on how to teach the subject: the concepts and measurement of development, models of growth and development, and the international aspects of economic development. For the concepts of development, it is important to emphasize the coherence of the topics to be…