Taken from a post by David McKenzie on the World Bank Development Impact Blog

The World Bank is currently conducting a study and survey on how development economics is taught in developing countries, focusing on undergraduate and masters level classes. The aim is to use this to understand the following questions:

• Is there a core of development economics taught worldwide and what topics does it constitute?
• How does emphasis on different topics differ according to level of income and involvement of the state in the economy?
• How much is development economics now taught as an empirical versus a theoretical subject?
• How does knowledge flow from the research frontier to development economics classrooms?

The syllabi of development economics classes, examples of the exams, and the answers of the short online survey are being collected in order to get consistent information on the content of development economics classes offered around the world. If you have taught developing economics in a developing country in the past three years, please answer the survey (a French version is also available) and send the syllabi as well as a final exam to apaffhausen@worldbank.org.

The survey should only take about 15 minutes to complete, and results will be kept confidential and used for research purposes only. As compensation for participation, all respondents who answer the survey before May 1, 2015 are eligible to a random draw for ten amazon.com vouchers/gift cards of the amount of USD 50 each. 

On April 24th, EASST Visiting Fellows traveled to UC Santa Cruz to present ongoing research to UCSC students and faculty. John Bosco Asiimwe presented his work, Working With Village Health Teams To Increase ORS Use In Uganda: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Fredrick Manang presented Build and they will come?: The impact of access to health facilities on Maternal care use in rural Ethiopia, and Anthony Mveyange presented Does HIV/AIDS Matter for Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (a joint work with Tine Lesner and Christian Skovsgaard).

EASST Visiting Fellow Anthony Mveyange presented his research, "Metals and Minerals: China's WTO Accession and Local Economic Effects in Africa" at UC Berkeley's Environmental and Resource Economics Seminar.

The paper investigates the question of if and how China's accession to WTO in late 2001 affected local economic activities in Africa by paying special attention to the local economic effects in 4475 districts across 42 African countries. Set up as a quasi-experiment, the study exploits both spatial and temporal variation in mineral deposits across African districts to investigate effects on district economic growth and inequality before and after China's accession to WTO. The results suggest that China's accession to WTO was meaningful in reducing district inequality up to 0.043 Gini points. The findings also show positive but insignificant effects on economic growth. The findings indirectly run against the recently proposed argument that China has somehow been instrumental in explaining recent economic growth in Africa. Of interest to note, however, is that the mineral rich districts experienced significant economic growth without China's accession to WTO. Further, the findings question the validity of the widely celebrated classical "resource curse" literature, particularly for Africa. These results are robust to several controls and specification tests. 

Makhtar Diop, Vice President for the World Bank, Africa Region was invited to UC Berkeley as the Regent's Lecturer to discuss "Policymaking in Africa: Reflections from Decades of Experience" on March 31, 2015. 

Makhtar Diop has served as the World Bank's vice President for Africa since May 2012. Under his leadership, the World Bank Group committed a record-breaking $15.3 billion to Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014 tro help tackle development challenges such as food security and agricultural productivity; access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy; and responding quickly and effectively to emergency situations such as the recent Ebola epidemic.  A passionate advocate for Africa's right to clean and affordable sources of electricity, he has called for a green energy revolution. In 2014, Jeune Afrique named him "one of the 50 most influential Africans".

Mr. Diop met with EASST fellows John Bosco Asiimwe (Uganda), Fredrick Manang (Tanzania), and  Anthony Mveyange (Tanzania) to discuss research and the importance of institutionalizing impact evaluation in African universities. 

EASST Fellow Anthony Mveyange and fellow alumna Annet Adong attended the Center for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) conference in Oxford from March 22-24, 2015.  The conference consisted of parallel sessions, plenary sessions, and a keynote, and featured papers addressed the economic analysis of the broad issues relevant for economic development in Africa.