What Is Considered Development Economics? Commonalities and Differences in University Courses around the Developing World
通过调查56个发展中国家和美国的200多门课程，发现发展经济学教学内容差异很大，存在四种不同取向：理论宏观、实证微观、混合核心和广泛覆盖。
We use a combination of surveys of instructors and data from course syllabi to examine how the subject of development economics is taught at the undergraduate and Master’s level in over 200 courses in 56 developing countries and the United States. We find there is considerable heterogeneity in what is considered development economics: there is a narrow core of topics (growth theory, poverty and inequality, human capital, and institutions) taught in at least half the classes and large variation in the role of theory versus empirics. Employing clustering techniques, we find four views of development: a theoretical macro-based approach; an empirical micro-based approach; a mixed approach narrowly focused on these common core topics; and an expansive approach covering a much broader range of topics. We find country, course, and instructor characteristics are all associated with these differences in how development economics is conceptualized.