西方经济学绪论.pptVIP

* * * * * Panel (a) above, shows the annual rate of growth of U.S. aggregate output from 1948 to 2004. Although output grew in most years, with an average growth rate of 3.3%, the actual growth rate fluctuated with the business cycle, and output actually declined in some years. * Panel (b) shows the same data presented in a different form: it shows real GDP from 1948 to 2004. From it we see that given a sufficiently long period of time to be independent of the business cycle, real GDP has grown substantially. * Although recessions are temporary phenomena, they produce a considerable amount of economic pain for an economy’s members. So one of the key missions of macroeconomics is to understand why recessions happen, and what, if anything, can be done about them. * Clearly, nothing like the Great Depression ─ the huge surge in unemployment that dominates the figure─has happened since. But economists who argued during the 1960s that the business cycle had been completely tamed were proved wrong by severe recessions in the 1970s and early 1980s. * The word “secular”, in this context, is used to distinguish long-run growth from the expansion phase of business cycles, which lasts less than 5 years on average. Secular long-run growth refers to the growth of the economy over several decades. * As a result of this long-run growth, the U.S. economy’s aggregate output per person was about 7.5 times as large in 2004 as it was in 1900. (Note that there was a 7.5-fold increase in real GDP per capita over the same period in which there was a 20-fold increase in real GDP; the difference in these two numbers is due to a much larger U.S. population in 2004 compared to 1900.) * This and the next two slides are from the FYI box entitled “A Picture is Worth A Thousand Statistics.” These photos put a human face on the statistics and theories. Many students connect to these pictures more than to the data in Table 1. For each picture, the family was paid to drag all of its st