Checking date: 22/04/2024


Course: 2024/2025

Hunger, poverty, inequality and global challenges
(19156)
Master in Global Sustainable Development and Global Governance (Plan: 473 - Estudio: 376)
EPC


Coordinating teacher: NICOLINI ALESSI, ESTEBAN ALBERTO

Department assigned to the subject: Social Sciences Department

Type: Compulsory
ECTS Credits: 3.0 ECTS

Course:
Semester:




Objectives
- Knowledge of Amartya Sen¿s capabilities approach. - Study of the definitions and measurement of poverty and inequality. - Understanding of the global challenges generated by poverty and inequalities, and problems linked to their governance. - Knowledge of the approach of multidimensional poverty and its relationship with sustainable development. - Ability to understand the concept of inequality of opportunities and its normative and functional relevance. - Ability to understand and implement a gender perspective in the measurement of capabilities, poverty, inequality and health and education indicators. - Knowledge of the main theories explaining sustainable development and capabilities and welfare. - Knowledge of the concept of food security and its relationship with poverty, hunger and humanitarian crisis. - Capacity to understand the interaction between food vulnerability and the economic and institutional characteristics of land use and property. - Knowledge of the main theories that explain the capabilities and welfare dimensions of sustainable development.
Skills and learning outcomes
Description of contents: programme
1.Sen¿s capabilities approach and the human development index. 2.Income poverty: definition and measurement. Absolute and relative poverty. National and international poverty lines and the 1.25 US dollar per day. 3.Multidimensional poverty. Extreme poverty and hunger. 4.Inequality. Normative issues and measurement. Gini coefficient and General Entropy Index. 5.Structural inequality and inequality of opportunities. 6.The gender dimension in the measurement of poverty and inequality. 7.Global challenges generated by poverty, inequalities and their governance. 8.International and regional institutions, their role in generating collective action to alleviate hunger, poverty and inequality, and respective challenges.
Learning activities and methodology
- Theorical classes - Practical classes with discussions of recent contribution of the literature - Tutorial classes - Teamwork with analysis of applied cases
Assessment System
  • % end-of-term-examination 40
  • % of continuous assessment (assigments, laboratory, practicals...) 60




Basic Bibliography
  • Sachs, Jeffrey . The Age of Sustainable Development. Columbia University Press. 2015
  • Sen, Amartya . On economic inequality. Clarendon, Oxford. 1997
Additional Bibliography
  • Bezawit Beyene Chichaibelu, et al.. The global cost of reaching a world without hunger: Investment costs and policy action opportunities. Food Policy, Volume 104. 2021
  • Deininger and Squire. New ways of looking at old issues: inequality and growth. Journal of Development Economics 57, 259-287. 1998
  • Ferreira et al.. A global count of the extreme poor in 2012. Data issues, methodology and initial results. Policy Research Working Paper 7432. World Bank. 2016
  • Lakner and Milanovic. Global Income Distribution. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession. The World Bank Economic Review 30, 203-232. 2015
  • Lipton, Michael. Poverty, undernutrition, and hunger. World Bank Staff Working Papers, 597. 1983
  • Ravallion. Poverty Comparisons. A guide of concepts and methods. Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper, World Bank. 1992
  • Ravallion, Datt y de Walle. Quantifying Absolute Poverty in the Developing World. Review of Income and Wealth, 37, 4, 345-61. 1991
  • Ray, Debraj. Development Economics. Princeton University Press. Chapter 8. 1998
  • World Bank . Taking on inequality. World Bank. 2016

The course syllabus may change due academic events or other reasons.