The Erasmus Mundus Master course in “Economic Development and Growth (MEDEG)” has four main objectives:
- to educate an innovative generation of analysts, researchers and professionals in the field of economic development and growth;
- to create a high-quality European master programme able to compete in the international market for higher education as a reference centre for research and professional training in the field of economic development and growth;
- to institutionalize the mobility and interaction of students and scholars across Europe and with Third-Countries;
- to contribute to European education’s excellence and competitiveness at international level within the European Higher Education system.
MEDEG combines the complementary expertise existing at three leading European Universities into a common platform of graduate education and training. This objective is pursued within the guidelines of the Bologna process and aims to contribute to the development of the European Higher Education Area.
The MEDEG gives students with high academic and professional potential, coming both from the EU and Third-countries, the opportunity to specialize in an exciting area of economic studies and spend two years in an international academic environment oriented towards the promotion of research and teaching excellence.
One of MEDEG’s key specificity is its original approach to the subject of Economic Development and Growth, which emphasizes the importance of long-run and institutional factors. MEDEG’s ambition is in fact to train a new generation of professionals in the field of Economic Development and Growth endowed not only with solid economic analytical skill but also with a proper understanding of the constraints and opportunities provided by institutions and history.
As a matter of fact, an ever increasing number of studies in the field of economic development consider the quality of a country’s institutions (the legal framework; the protection and enforcement of property rights and the rule of law; the efficiency of judiciaries and bureaucracies; cultural, religious, or ethnical identities; the articulation of political representation; access to education and health; constraints on government and rule-based norms of economic policy; social and institutional frictions in the working of factor markets) a powerful determinant of economic success or failure.
Economic development is largely based on the ability to build stable, efficient and effective institutions that enhance growth, promote economic and social opportunities and reduce poverty and deprivation. Institution-building however never takes place in a vacuum, but needs to be embedded into a historically-specific space of social and economic relationship on which the past casts a long shadow. ‘Good’ institutions cannot simply be transplanted but always need to be adapted, or even invented, if they are to work under country- and historical-specific circumstances. From different perspectives, recent contributions such as William Easterly’s The Elusive Quest for Growth (MIT Press 2002), Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton and Co. 2002), provide excellent examples of this new approach to development.
There exists an expanding demand by private and public institutions in the field of Economic Development for researchers and professionals with a broad and dynamic knowledge rather than with a narrow-band specialization in specific issues. Boundaries between theory of economic development and growth, economic history, institutional economics and management of development programs are getting increasingly blurred. What the professional market demands is a graduate with a rich and comprehensive background.
Combining rigorous economic analysis with a proper understanding of institutional and historical complexities represents therefore an essential element of viable development strategies. The researchers and professionals educated in the MEDEG will be able satisfactorily to deal with the complexity and multiple dimensions of economic development and growth when they’ll be responsible to carry out research, design policies or implement projects in less developed countries.
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