<p>I will be doing a MA or Ms in development/ International economics in the U.K. this coming September. I've already gotten a few offers but I am wondering which Master will be the most marketable.</p>
<p>Hopefully I will land a job in an international organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, UN etc...basically be working in development.
However I also wouldn't mind working in a different area, like for institutions that don't necessarily specialize in development. That's why I feel like a Ms Development Economics would limit my job prospects.
I feel like International Economics is broader and it contains development economics anyways. I can even work in Finance with a Ms International Econ.</p>
<p>Which degree you get won’t matter. It’s what you do with the degree - which classes you take, which internships you do, what kind of part-time work you do while in the program, and where you get it.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, it would seem that international economics is more broad - and conversely, that development economics is really a subset of international economics. Int’l econ focuses on the economics of interactions between countries, while development economics would focus on that but more narrowly, in the context of developing countries.</p>
<p>Honestly, the names of programs are often chosen with a mind to marketing and as a general descriptor. But depending on the department, a development economics degree may be more similar to another department’s international economics degree than it is to a third department’s developmental economics degree. There are also programs in international and development economics, like Yale (<a href=“http://www.yale.edu/ide/”>http://www.yale.edu/ide/</a>).</p>
<p>An MS in development economics would, for sure, have classes that focus specifically in developmental policy and the economics of developing countries. An international economics program may or may not have those courses, so if you are interested in working specifically in development economics but you want the general int’l econ degree, you need to find a program that has classes like that. Both departments likely have international internships, but a development econ one will probably focus on sending you to developing nations. However, you can likely find that kind of internship at a more general program too. Regardless of which degree you choose to go with, if you develop strong quantitative analysis skills and possibly also some policy analysis (for places like the World Bank, IMF and UN, they’ll want that), then you should be employable.</p>
<p>tl;dr version: The name of the degree doesn’t matter as much as what you can do. You could work in finance with an MS in development econ - heck, you could work in finance with an MA in art history if you know how to do the models.</p>