Introduction to Macroeconomics: Mastering the Global Community

DESCRIPTION:
Learn about the economic forces that govern the world, influencing employment, inflation, interest rates ... and impacting the lives of hundreds of millions.

This comprehensive business course brings basic macroeconomic concepts, strategies and practices alive through interviews with renowned experts, case studies and documentary presentations of real life events.

Led by a professor of the Business School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Introduction to Macroeconomics develops the concepts, strategies, and models required for analyzing key issues, including:

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its components
  
• impact of interest rates, saving, and investment on economic growth
  
• unemployment
  
• the money supply, price levels, and inflation
  
• international trade and capital flows
  
• the aggregate supply and demand model
  
• monetary and fiscal policy issues

LESSONS:

Long Run: Production & Growth
Introduces productivity and its impact on the standard of living and long-run prosperity. Explores the determinants of productivity and the factors behind economic growth.

Long Run: Savings, Investment & Finance
Examines the role that financial markets, savings, and investments play in economic growth. Offers a short, thorough primer on microeconomic market analysis. Illustrates the loanable funds model.

Long Run: Employment
Investigates unemployment, the labor force participation rate, and the government's techniques for measuring unemployment. Explores the impact of demography and the natural rate concept.

Long Run: Money & Prices
Defines money, its historical forms and functions, and recent technological innovations. Discusses the Federal Reserve System and the difficulties of trying to maintain control of the money supply. Shows impact of the money supply on the price level.

Research Project 1
Develops research skills as students are asked to choose a country that saw a severe economic fluctuation, analyze data on that nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), unemployment, inflation, and growth rate for that time period, and sum up the findings in a report.

Long Run: Inflation
Analyzes inflation, emphasizing growth of the money supply as its fundamental cause and examining several 20th-century hyperinflations. Discusses the quantity theory of money, the link between inflation and nominal interest rates, and the costs of inflation.

Fundamentals of the Open Economy
Expands the scope of study from a single-nation, closed economy model to a global, open economy approach. Analyzes the international flow of goods and capital. Explores exchange rates and the Purchasing Power Parity theory.

Modeling the Open Economy
Diagrams the Market for Loanable Funds in an open economy, discusses the Market for Foreign Currency Exchange, then combines these two markets into one model to predict the impact of changes in policy or in the behavior of consumers and firms.

Research Project 2: Analysis
Engages students in researching the political and economic events that led to the crisis they previously documented and has them detail the government's response to the crisis. Asks students to analyze cause and effect, work with arguments developed by experts, and break down competing theories to identify the different lines of reasoning.

Short Run: Aggregate Supply & Demand
Shifts course emphasis from the long run to the short run, laying the foundations for the analysis of economic stabilization policy. Explores the business cycle, the Aggregate Supply, Aggregate Demand (ASAD) model.

Short Run: Monetary & Fiscal Policy
Shows students how to use the Aggregate Supply, Aggregate Demand (ASAD) model to explain the causes and consequences of business cycles and to evaluate monetary and fiscal policy. Explains how a drop in aggregate demand or a shock to the supply side of the economy can lead to a recession.

Short Run: Inflation & Unemployment
Introduces students to the Phillips Curve, which expresses the short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Examines the impact of supply shocks and inflationary expectations on the trade-off it represents. Develops strategies for controlling inflation, and examines their costs and the importance of policymakers' credibility.

Short Run: The Policy Wars
Analyzes five actual policy debates: the choice between active and passive stabilization policy; rules versus discretion in monetary policy; the appropriate goals of monetary policy; balancing the federal budget; the tax system as a tool that promotes specific outcomes.

Research Project 3: Synthesis and Evaluation
Culminates the previous two projects by having students evaluate the material they have collected. They must assess the merits of the arguments they found and formulate their own position, using the models taught in the course. Also, asks students to critique the policies that were used to deal with the crisis.