西方经济学(宏观)课件CHAPTER01.ppt

CHAPTER 1 MACROECONOMICS: THE BIG PICTURE 1.2 Economist John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory as well as on many governments fiscal policies. He advocated interventionist government policy, by which the government would use fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions, depressions and booms. He is one of the fathers of modern theoretical macroeconomics. What You Will Learn in this Chapter: Macroeconomics vs. Microeconomics Macroeconomics vs. Microeconomics Macroeconomics vs. Microeconomics Microeconomics focuses on how decisions are made by individuals and firms and the consequences of those decisions Ex.: How much it would cost for a university or college to offer a new course ─ the cost of the instructor’s salary, the classroom facilities, the class materials, and so on Having determined the cost, the school can then decide whether or not to offer the course by weighing the costs and benefits Macroeconomics vs. Microeconomics Macroeconomics examines the aggregate behavior of the economy (i.e., how the actions of all the individuals and firms in the economy interact to produce a particular level of economic performance as a whole) Ex.: Overall level of prices in the economy (how high or how low they are relative to prices last year) rather than the price of a particular good or service Four Principal Ways that Macroeconomics Differs from Microeconomics: Four Principal Ways that Macroeconomics Differs from Microeconomics (continued): The Business Cycle The business cycle is the short-run alternation between economic downturns and economic upturns A depression is a very deep and prolonged downturn Recessions are periods of economic downturns when output and employment are falling Expansions, sometimes called recoveries, are periods of econo