20624 - GLOBAL SCENARIOS - MODULE 1 (Macroeconomics)

After decades of unprecedented growth, since 2008 the world economy has entered a growth slowdown. In some countries – particularly but not exclusively in Southern Europe – this slowdown manifested itself as a very deep recession. Since then, central banks and Governments avoided another Great Depression through their extraordinary activism. Having this in mind, this course aims to enable students to understand what happened in the last ten years, think in a structured way about the future of the macro-economy. In particular the course aims at helping students in developing personal views as to such questions as: Are we on a return path to normality or are we in a New Normal of slow growth or instead new technologies and globalization bring back the world to the pace of growth seen before? How different the world after this crisis be compared to the one we knew before?

This course is divided into two main parts. Part One concerns the behavior of the economy in the short run:

• Overview of the current scenario.
• How to measure the state of the economy.
• Macroeconomics and finance.
• What governments do.
• What central banks do.
• Exchange rates and speculation.

Part Two concerns the development of economies in the long-run and globalization:

• Determinants of economic growth.
• Structural reforms and macroeconomic performance.
• Costs and benefits of economic globalization.
• Multinational Corporations, Global Value Chains and the macroeconomic environment.
• Inequality and technological change.

• Understand and master basic and advanced tools of macroeconomics for analyzing media and company news.
• Understand the manifestation and the causes of recessions and recoveries in the data.
• Understand how Governments and central banks’ policies may accelerate growth, counteract business fluctuations and affect exchange rates.
• Explain the costs and the benefits of globalization.
• Identify the trade-offs firms face in managing global operations.
• Recognize the impact of technological change on the economy and on inequality.

• Analyze media and company news about the economy.
• Analyze the most important macroeconomic variables.
• Evaluate economic policies and discuss their impact.
• Discuss the growth impact of economic policies.
• Discuss pros and cons of globalization.
• Evaluate trade-offs faced by global firms.
• Interpret the role of technological change.

• Face-to-face lectures
• Group assignments

The learning experience of this course includes, in addition to face-to-face lectures, group assignments to develop students’ own perspective and evaluation of the macroeconomic events in the media using the tools learned in class. Group assignments are the subject of class discussions, in which two groups confront each other on a specific issue.

With the purpose of measuring the acquisition of the above-mentioned learning outcomes, the students’ assessment is based on two main components:

1. Written exam (80% of the final grade). The written exam consists of open-ended questions and closed questions.
2. Group assignments (20%)

Students can take a partial written exam and complete the written exam at the end of the course. In this case the weight is: 40% for the partial and 40% for the final exam.

Students’ assessment is based on exams only, with the same options as for the attending students (partial + final, or just final).

A list of readings is made available on Bboard at the beginning of the course.