The course is arranged in two parts. The first part describes the main theoretical approaches to the economic development, on which the debate on the modernization has been built. The attention is focused on the problem of “underdevelopment”, and to the main solutions that many countries carried out. In this section, the main features of theories such as those of modernization and of dependency, as well as approaches such as those of the basic needs and of the self-reliance are described, analyzed and discussed. The analysis therefore focuses on some of the recent approaches to development (for instance, the sustainable development), with the aim of highlighting elements of continuity and novelty with respect to the development ideas that characterized the debate in the previous years.
The second part of the course focuses on the most recent debate on the processes of economic globalization and global value chains (GVC). In this field, through the study of some concrete cases, the actors composing these chains are described and analyzed, as well as the forms of the GVC and their role in the development processes both at the transnational level and at the local level.