Course Title：Inroduction to Economics

This course focuses on understanding and applying the basic principles of economics. The course does not assume any previous knowledge of economics and has no pre-requisites. The first part of the module covers microeconomics, which is concerned with the allocation of scarce resources between competing uses at the disaggregated level of individuals, households and firms. The central issue concerns the respective roles of the price mechanism and of the government in resource allocation. The second part of the course covers macroeconomics, which is concerned with economy-wide aggregates such as the overall scale of economic activity, the rate of inflation, the levels of employment and unemployment and the exchange rate. The central issue concerns the role of the government in tackling macroeconomic challenges such as reducing unemployment, promoting growth and maintaining price stability. Having successfully completed this module, students will be able to: explain and apply basic economic terminology; formulate and address economic and public policy issues using the language and approach of economics; set up and solve simple economic problems related to the technical topics in this module; and, articulate economic reasoning and results to others.