Dr. Tal Sadeh

The nexus between politics and economics shapes important dilemmas in local as well as domestic politics. How income is divided within and among countries, who is poor and who is rich, what gets produced, how governments and policies are shaped, and the role of leadership in the economy. This course reviews these issues emphasizing theory as well as practice, in four parts. First, the main schools of Political Economy are surveyed and applied to three important processes: Globalization and the information revolution, the 1970s and 1980s liberalization in the rich countries, and the 1990s transition from Communism to market economy in Eastern Europe. In its second part the course develops a rationalist approach to domestic politics, and examines the role of multinational corporations in the international political economic system, and the politics of trade from the different perspectives of the main paradigms. Finally, the course studies the role of political leadership in times of global economic crisis in the 1930s and the 2000s.

Syllabus