This Economics course provides a comprehensive overview of key economic principles, structured into 34 chapters:
- Welcome to Economics!: Introduces economics, differentiating between microeconomics and macroeconomics, and discusses economic theories and systems.
- Choice in a World of Scarcity: Explores how individuals make choices based on budget constraints and the production possibilities frontier.
- Demand and Supply: Covers the basics of market equilibrium, shifts in demand and supply, price ceilings and floors, and market efficiency.
- Labor and Financial Markets: Discusses demand and supply in labor and financial markets and the efficiency of market systems.
- Elasticity: Focuses on price elasticity of demand and supply, elasticity in various contexts, and its impact on pricing.
- Consumer Choices: Examines consumption choices, the impact of income and price changes, and behavioral economics.
- Production, Costs, and Industry Structure: Looks at costs (explicit and implicit), short and long-run production and costs, and industry structures.
- Perfect Competition: Explores the nature of perfect competition, output decisions, long-run entry and exit decisions, and market efficiency.
- Monopoly: Discusses the formation of monopolies, barriers to entry, and monopoly pricing.
- Monopolistic Competition and Oligopoly: Covers the characteristics and outcomes of monopolistic competition and oligopoly.
- Monopoly and Antitrust Policy: Addresses corporate mergers, anticompetitive behavior, regulation of natural monopolies, and deregulation.
- Environmental Protection and Negative Externalities: Examines pollution economics, regulatory approaches, market-oriented environmental tools, and the balance between economic output and environmental protection.
- Positive Externalities and Public Goods: Discusses innovation, public goods, and how governments can encourage innovation.
- Labor Markets and Income: Covers labor market theories, wage determination, unions, employment discrimination, and immigration.
- Poverty and Economic Inequality: Looks at defining poverty, the poverty trap, safety nets, income inequality, and government policies.
- Information, Risk, and Insurance: Discusses imperfect information, asymmetric information, and the role of insurance.
- Financial Markets: Explores how businesses and households interact with financial markets and personal wealth accumulation.
- Public Economy: Examines voter participation, special interest politics, and flaws in democratic systems.
- The Macroeconomic Perspective: Introduces macroeconomic concepts like GDP, tracking economic performance, and comparing GDP among countries.
- Economic Growth: Discusses the arrival of economic growth, labor productivity, components of growth, and economic convergence.
- Unemployment: Defines and measures unemployment, examines patterns and causes of unemployment in the short and long run.
- Inflation: Covers tracking inflation, measuring cost of living changes, and the experiences of inflation in different countries.
- International Trade and Capital Flows: Looks at trade balances, financial capital flows, national saving and investment identity, and the pros and cons of trade deficits and surpluses.
- The Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply Model: Introduces the AD/AS model, examining demand and supply shifts and their macroeconomic implications.
- The Keynesian Perspective: Focuses on Keynesian analysis of aggregate demand, the Phillips Curve, and market forces.
- The Neoclassical Perspective: Discusses neoclassical analysis and its policy implications, balancing Keynesian and neoclassical models.
- Money and Banking: Defines money, measures it, explores the role of banks, and how banks create money.
- Monetary Policy and Bank Regulation: Examines central banks, bank regulation, execution of monetary policy, and its outcomes and pitfalls.
- Exchange Rates and International Capital Flows: Discusses the workings of foreign exchange markets, macroeconomic effects of exchange rates, and exchange rate policies.
- Government Budgets and Fiscal Policy: Covers government spending, taxation, deficits, fiscal policy tools, automatic stabilizers, and the balanced budget debate.
- The Impacts of Government Borrowing: Explores how government borrowing affects investment, trade balance, private saving, and economic growth.
- Macroeconomic Policy Around the World: Looks at the diversity of global economies, standards of living, unemployment, inflation, and trade concerns worldwide.
- International Trade: Discusses absolute and comparative advantage, intra-industry trade, and the benefits of reducing trade barriers.
- Globalization and Protectionism: Examines protectionism, global trade's impact on jobs and wages, arguments for and against import restrictions, and trade policy dynamics.
Each chapter includes key terms, summaries, self-check and review questions, critical thinking challenges, and problems to solve, providing a comprehensive understanding of economic principles and their real-world applications.