Macroeconomic Policy

Teacher(s)

Nyembwe Musungaïe André;

Language

French

Prerequisites

The prerequisite(s) for this Teaching Unit (Unité d’enseignement – UE) for the programmes/courses that offer this Teaching Unit are specified at the end of this sheet.

Main themes

The study of issues in Macroeconomics will build on basic concepts from economic theory (supply, demand and market equilibrium). It will be important for students to be able to move from these basic concepts to analyse concrete topical issues such as revenue, employment, world trade, the financial markets and the movement of capital, the causes of recessions and elements favouring growth.

Aims

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	This course aims to give students the foundations they need to understand the evolution of "macroeconomic" variables such as production, employment, inflation, competition, etc., the objective being to enable them to analyse the evolution observed, the role of institutions and public authorities and the advantages and the disadvantages of a range of economic policies.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

Content

The course will presents key macroeconomic variables before to deal with goods, financial and labour markets. Monetary and Fiscal policies will then be analysed through models (IS-LM for the short term and AS-AD for the medium term). The link between unemployment and inflation will be discussed before that which prevails between financial markets and economic policies through expectations. Then, features of opened economies, domestic economy competitiveness, exchange rate policy and macroeconomic interdependence will be treated before to tackle long term growth factors and growth policy.

Teaching methods

The course adopts an inductive approach. Economic events or facts, as reported in newspapers, will be shortly discussed in order to introduce the chapters dealing with the related theoretical models.

Evaluation methods

A written exam of 3 hours will be composed as follows: a series of "TRUE" or "FALSE" items to be justified by a three line paragraph, a piece of newspapers economic text to be explained by the mean of an appropriate analytical tool, and an exercise which will be similar to those solved during exercise sessions. A compulsory mid-term test will partially count (a quarter of the total) towards the final mark.

Bibliography

Le support de base du cours est le manuel "Macroéconomie", 6e édition, d'Olivier Blanchard et Daniel Cohen. (Ed. Pearson). Les diapositives du cours ex cathedra ainsi qu'un portefeuille d'articles de presse, permettant de lier davantage le cours théorique aux questions économiques réelles, seront  progressivement postés sur icampus.

Faculty or entity

ESPO