Masters in less than 30 credit hours?

[MrPanda]

For comparison, the Master of Economics in Peru is composed of 23 courses, and it takes 2 years (after a 5 years bachelors).

23 courses would seem excessive for a US program, I think?

However, I understand that maybe economics and business are very different, and maybe those programs could be longer.

Yes that would be very excessive in the US. I've looked at MS in Econ here in the US and they were 36 credits. 23 grad courses in 2 years would be a lot of work. Are they 3 credit courses? That's a 69 credit master's which is odd.

Outside of the US 60 is fairly standard. The UK breaks it up into taught MSc and a research based MRes, each 30 US credits, to be done sequentially. Same with Oz. Unless you're doing something more applied like an MBA where you find 90 ECTS/45 US credit ones, mainland Europe its a 2-year 60 US credit/120 ECTS program where the thesis usually accounts for 30 ECTS, with typically 90/5 = 18 classes for the remaining credits.

I am not surprised to hear Peru is similar. I know several Latin American countries follow this model. It is one of the reasons those with a US masters sometimes struggle to get into PhD programs overseas. in the UK it is not so bad since they can just be asked to do an MRes or MPhil along the way, but where I am in Germany we've had several US students need do the 2 year masters--and they already had a 30 credit US masters--in order to gain access to the PhD program.

In Peru some masters take 2 years (where you only take courses), and after you complete all courses, you can start your thesis. And the thesis doesn´t grant credits.

In Portugal, there are different masters with differents lenghts, for example, the Master in Corporate Science at U. of Lisbon is 1 year of courses (60 ECTS) + thesis (30 ECTS), for total of 90 ECTS.

I have known of somebody with a US´s LLM that wanted to be a professor in Peru, but his degree didn´t qualify, because it didn´t have enough number of credits.