Pedro Vicente, a Nonresident, Faculty Fellow of the Navarra Center for International Development, gave an intensive course on Development Economics at the University of Navarra. The course focused on the main topics in the development economics literature.

The course brought into focus three different strategies to improve development and fight poverty: health and education, finance and agriculture. These three areas are classical themes inside development and are a successful way to promote and measure development. For example, education is a long run main driver of development explained Pedro Vicente.

“The course is very empirical, we apply the methods of econometrics to understand what’s the impact of a specific policy”, said Vicente.  “The course is mainly about identifying those policies that make a lot of sense on theory grounds and then checking if they actually have the benefits expected”.

Pedro Vicente is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Economics at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and he is also a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago, in 2005, in the area of Econometrics and Statistics.