Public Policy

This course aims at providing students with a broad knowledge about poverty. The focus is on the manifold relationships between poverty and the labor and housing markets, family composition and fertility choices, and education. It starts with poverty measurement in the following perspectives: static, dynamic, uni-dimensional, and multi- dimensional, this latter relating to equality of opportunity and civic participation. It provides an understanding of poverty's main causes, and helps the students into critical thinking about how to fight it. It also covers the basics of low-income support programs. The students are endowed with the tools to critically assess different programs aiming at reducing poverty in developed countries.