2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Nov 28, 2024

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

ECON 248 - Living on the Edge? Latin America, Asia and the Global Economy since 1600

This course explores the role of the world economy in the economic development of what was once known as the periphery - Asia and Latin America - over the period 1600-1990. The course uses the tools of basic trade theory and international macroeconomics to understand the impact of two signal events on Latin American and Asian economic development. The “Great Divergence” was when the Asian periphery first fell behind northwest Europe and the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. Parallel events saw Latin American economies fall behind the United States. The First Globalization of the second half of the 19th century through the 1920s marked the emergence of trade and financial integration between the developed North and developing South. The break-up of the global economy during the Great Depression and decolonization prompted national experiments that emphasized decoupling from the world economy. Why countries turned away from those experiments ca. 1990 to pursue today’s integration with the global economy is a key question for the course. The historical perspective informs our understanding of current debates about de-industrialization, the existence of a resource curse and the suitability of various models - the east Asian model, export-led growth, labor-intensive growth or import substitution industrialization - for achieving consistent economic performance.

Prerequisites: ECON 010 and ECON 011

Course Designation/Attribute: HP

Anticipated Terms Offered: every other year