MA International Development

University of Essex

What interests you? Undertake a research project of your choosing, studying a specific economic issue or set of problems in depth, with supervision from our world-leading academic staff. Gain experience of original and independent work, making use of and building on skills that you have acquired during your Masters.

Microeconomics studies the economic behaviour of individual economic decision makers such as consumers, workers, firms, or managers. You will be looking at decision-making and markets when all agents have perfect information about goods and prices and individual agents cannot affect prices through their own actions. Later in the module you will turn to the concept of market equilibrium with more detailed understanding of demand and supply in order to derive properties of market behaviour.

This module provides an introduction to the econometric methods commonly used to analyse economic data and the application of these methods. The focus of the module is on linear regression and the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation procedure. This is introduced after a review of basic probability, random variables, simple descriptive statistics and the concept of the null hypothesis.

What are the distinctive features of less developed economies? How do theories around child labour or inequality explain poverty? What economic policies could alleviate such problems? Understand the issues facing developing countries, examining policies theoretically and empirically. Act as a policy advisor, undertaking research on issues of development economics.

This module equips you with the tools to critically access experimental methods commonly used in economics. You will put theoretical knowledge into practice, learning how to design experiments and interpret results. With a growing interest in behavioural considerations, experiments are increasingly used not only in psychology, but also economics and political science. Recognizing the value of controlled variation to study causal relationships, large companies also increasingly use "A-B testing".

This policy-oriented module probes the role and limits of government interventions in the microeconomic management of developed economies. In so doing, the analysis emphasises: (i) examination of the most common market failures and evaluation of options available for government to address them; and (ii) the factors that determine the choice and design of economic and regulatory policies to address these market failures given governments' political objectives. The module then goes on to explore the emergence of government failures and the reasons why the interactions between economics and politics impose constraints on the design of public policies, thereby enabling you to appreciate the associated policy issues and trade-offs.