HI 6530 - Economics: Theories, Tools, and Debates

Credits: 3

Description This course introduces teacher candidates to the concepts and theories that are generally characterized under the headings of micro and macroeconomics. Microeconomics offers a variety of tools for deciphering the success and failure of individual markets in bringing about efficient resource allocation and use as well as how government market intervention may benefit or jeopardize those outcomes. Macroeconomics provides categories for evaluating national economic performance. Macroeconomic models seek to explain economic growth and related issues of business cycles, unemployment, price stability, the health of the financial system as well as how government fiscal and monetary policy can be utilized over the course of a business cycle. Providing the student a basic understanding of the range of conceptual and graphical tools and models utilized by economists and the debates regarding the problems and issues addressed by these two broad areas of economic thought is the substance of the course. Integrated into the course will be the application of how such tools may be used to analyze the changing position of the U.S. in the global economy including foreign trade, currency valuation and U.S. competitiveness.