Prof Robert Wade CON.7.07

This course is available on the Global MSc in Management, Global MSc in Management (MBA Exchange), MSc in Development Management, MSc in Development Studies, MSc in Environment and Development, MSc in Global Politics, MSc in Health and International Development, MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies and MSc in Political Economy of Late Development. This course is not available as an outside option.

Students will be allocated places to courses with priority to ID and joint-degree students.  If there are more ID and joint-degree students than the course can accommodate, these spots will be allocated randomly.  

Non-ID/Joint Degree students will be allocated to spare places by random selection with the preference given first to those degrees where the regulations permit this option. 

Undergraduate economics gives a big advantage, but is not pre-requisite.

The course takes off from “the Great Divergence”, the relentlessly growing gap during the past two and more centuries  between the average income of the West  and that of most countries of the South. Northeast Asia is the only non-western region to have substantially caught up. How do we explain this central fact of the “wealth of nations” – which is all the more shocking in light of the existence of a large-scale western aid industry operating since the Second World War? Much of development studies treats development as analogous to a marathon race, in which each runner’s (country’s) position is independent of the position of others; there is no structure to the race such that some must be ahead and others must be behind. This is deeply misleading. Questions about appropriate development policies and institutions at country level have to be put in the context of the hierarchically ordered world economy and world polity, led since the Second World War by the US with European states and Japan as subordinate allies.

The course covers the performance of the world economy as a whole (eg trends in growth, inequality, poverty); international systems of production, trade, and finance; the rules or regimes which govern interaction between economies, states and firms (regimes such as Bretton Woods, the Post Bretton Woods dollar standard, Investor-State Dispute Settlement, etc.); and several international organisations (such as the World Bank,  IMF, UNCTAD, G20). Along the way it analyses the major financial/economic crises of 1997-99 and 2007-09. In contrast to the mostly western-centric literature in International Political Economy, it looks at these things from the perspective of low and middle-income countries in the spirit of the Swahili proverb, "Until lions have their own historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunters", and does not assume that the G7 states provide a generally benign (‘win-win’) environment for development in the rest of the world (as in the G7/World Economic Forum mindset “free trade and free capital mobility benefits us all”).

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars in the MT. Seminars will be at or upwards of 45 minutes duration and lectures will be at or above 60 minutes duration.

There will be a reading week in Week 6.

Students have the option of writing one essay of 2,000 words in MT.

Core text: John Ravenhill (ed), Global Political Economy, 5th edition, OUP, 2017.

Take-home assessment (100%) in January.

The paper will be released via the course Moodle site. Please note that as this is a 48 hour take-home examination in January.  Students who cannot commit to be available for the exam period may NOT register for this course.