At the end of this course, students shall have a proper notion of the key questions asked by scholars interested in poverty today, and (hopefully) they will be able to provide a few answers as well. Both questions and answers are viewed through an economic perspective, but also a few insights from psicology will be discussed. The student who successfully completes the course will be able to evaluate and assess policy interventions aimed at reducing extreme poverty. Moreover, she will understand the difference between correlation and causation and will be able to disentangle descriptive pieces of evidence from causal ones.