Africa in the World Economy Fall 2013 By William Easterly, Professor of Economics (Joint with Africa House, Co-director of Development Research Institute at NYU) The list of readings is longer than what you are required to know. You are required only to know what is presented in class lectures. I will distribute copies of slides and lecture notes for each lecture. The list of readings will be updated, with some very recent articles replacing old ones, as I prepare each section of lectures. This class asks: Why is Africa poor? What must we do to end poverty in Africa? Who is we? There is no textbook for the class, but this article will be a sort of short textbook, supplemented by the articles below: William Easterly, Can the West Save Africa?, Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008 Pre-colonial history and African development Bockstette, Valerie, Areendam Chanda, and Louis Putterman, 2002, “States and Markets: the Advantage of an Early Start,” Journal of Economic Growth, 7, 347-369 Comin, Diego, William Easterly, and Erick Gong, “Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?”, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2 (July 2010): 65–97 http://williameasterly.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/60_easterly_comin_gong_wealthofnations_prp.pdf Nunn, Nathan, “Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa’s Past to its Current Underdevelopment”, Journal of Development Economics, 83 (2007), 157–175. http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/nunn/files/legacy_jde.pdf Putterman, Louis and David Weil “Post-1500 Population Flows and the Long Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 125:4, November 2010, http://www.nber.org/papers/w14448 Wacziarg, Romain and Enrico Spolaore, “The Diffusion of Development”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2009, vol. 124, no. 2 The slave trade and colonialism