MIAGE Students Spent Spring Break in Peru and Costa Rica
Peru: Students participated in Professor Jay Barney's Entrepreneurship & Poverty course, in which they learn about previous attempts to alleviate poverty, the benefits and limitations associated with these efforts, and the potential market based alternatives to poverty. These alternatives are all based on the assumption that poverty alleviation efforts must be consistent with the operation of competitive markets and include: Micro-finance and micro-enterprise, infrastructure development, establishing and maintaining property rights, and embedded entrepreneurial activities among the abject poor.
Costa Rica: Central to Community Development in the Global South is the interdisciplinary and
collaborative nature of community-based efforts in international development, specifically
in rural areas in lesser-developed countries of the Global South. This challenging
and exciting political science course introduces students to situations and topics
that highlight international aid over the decades, fair trade agriculture; sustainable
and ecological tourism; cooperative management; conservation biology; and the role
of community, sustainability, appropriate technology, scale and women in development.