Globalization & Poverty

The purpose of this course is to understand the conceptual and empirical issues underlaying the political economy of global poverty and human rights. What is poverty? What are the global dimensions of poverty? How does the discourse of human rights relate to underlying political economy of global capitalism? How does the discourse of human rights relate to the underlying causes of inequality and poverty in the world? In order to do this, we will look at the relationship between human rights, economic growth, poverty and inequalities in several different dimensions. After an initial exploration of these issues we will focus on the more recently developed social capabilites approach developed by Amartya Sen and others. We will explore the limits of policies under the existing institutional arrangements and examine the need for fundamental changes in the global political economy