Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Analyzes some of the historical reasons for the great divergence in world economic development, and undertakes a cross-country, cross-regional perspective of world economic development using a historical approach to long-run economic growth. Breadth-Social Sciences.

COURSE DETAILS:

 

Global inequalities of wealth and economic development are a defining feature of the contemporary world. Whether measured within or between countries of the global South and global North, inequalities of wealth, income, and carbon output all matter greatly for today’s world and the prospect of continued human life on Earth. But how can we begin to define such inequalities, explain patterns of continuity and change in them over time, and effectively address them? What have social scientists and historians argued are the causes of economic inequalities within countries and between countries of the global North and South? And what implications do these inequalities have for the global climate crisis and potential solutions to it? This course adopts a historically-informed, social scientific lens to probe such questions regarding continuity and change in these types of inequality. It is required for students pursuing the “International development, economic, and environmental issues” concentration of SFU’s International Studies major. In the concentration, students study the causes and consequences of global wealth and poverty, the ways in which the global economy works, development strategies and policies, and environmental problems including the climate crisis. As such, our course lays a conceptual and empirical foundation for deeper explorations of these core themes in later, upper-level courses within the concentration.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

By the end of the course, students:

• gain familiarity with social scientific conceptualizations of global economic inequalities;
• gain familiarity with social scientific arguments regarding degrees of historical change and continuity in global economic inequalities;
• gain familiarity with social scientific arguments about theorized causes of contemporary global economic inequalities, as well as ways of addressing them;
• develop skills in synthesizing and assessing such arguments through analytic writing

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: