World Economy Flashcards
(67 cards)
Supply side of the economy
Labour and product markets make up the supply
side of the economy - What can be produced? How much labor is supplied?
Demand side of the economy - three key sources:
- firms,
- households,
- government,
- expenditure by customers abroad (on the home country’s exports)
Origin of GDP measurement
- 1937: Simon Kuznets, an economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, presents the original formulation of gross domestic product in his report to the U.S. Congress, “National Income, 1929-35.”
- His idea is to capture all economic production by
individuals, companies, and the government in a single measure, which should rise in good times and fall in bad. GDP is born. - 1944: Bretton Woods conference - GDP becomes the standard tool for sizing up a country’s economy.
Microeconomics
- focus on the interactions of individual people given the rules that govern how they interact.
- To do this, we consider parts of the economy separately—the labour market, the markets for the goods and services that firms sell, and the credit market where borrowing and lending takes place.
Macroeconomics
- the study of the economy as a whole, and how the outcomes in one part of the economy affect, and are affected by, what happens in others.
- focus on totals and averages
Three ways of measuring value added:
GDP vs GNI
- Gross Domestic Product (GDP) denotes value of output of goods and services produced within a country
- Gross National Income (GNI) denotes value of output of goods and services produced by the nationals of a country (excluding foreign residents remittances but including remittances from nationals resident abroad).
GDP, GNI and the Current Account (CA) –> formula for CA + Private needs for funds + Public needs for funds = 0
Some peculiarities of GDP
Measuring value added: What are the three approaches?
Aggregate Production Function
- The “Cobb-Douglas” Production Function
- A model of production in the entire economy
- 𝑌 = 𝑇𝐹𝑃 × 𝐾^α × 𝐿^β
What are alpha and beta?
α + β determines the returns to scale
The Marginal Product of Capital
Solow model:
capital - STEADY STATE - meaning?
- investment = depreciation
- When this occurs, we say that we’re in a STEADY STATE, an equilibrium.
- At this point the capital stock is not changing and so neither is output
What is Productivity? Output per Input - Two notions of economic productivity:
TFP differentials as important as capital in differences in world income distribution?
Growth accounting - How do we Measure TFP?
- Theory says that MPK should be higher in poor countries and, assuming markets are efficient, capital should flow there.
- Reality (Caselli and Feyrer 2007): Rich countries: 8.4%, Poor countries: 6.9%
- Why? TFP is a critical component of the return to physical and human capital
- Capital is certainly part of the story but but not the only story
The key difference between the Solow model and endogenous growth models is that…
…the latter assume there is some mechanism which offsets the diminishing returns to capital
Potential mechanisms:
Research and development and knowledge spillovers
but also …
Investment in human capital
Schumpeter take on innovation - what drives it?
- entrepreneurs to innovate and destroy creatively
- Creative destruction: Innovation driven by the promise of excess profits, and new products and production methods making old products and firms obsolete
- Temporary monopoly profits (innovation rents) are possible as entrepreneurs capture markets.
- The size of the market important because it affects the scale of innovation rents that can be enjoyed.
- But also important that innovation cannot immediately be copied by an imitator: patents, trade secret …
- Institutions must be in place to ensure that the rents from innovation go to the entrepreneur and are not confiscated by the government or other powerful groups like organized crime.
- Impact of technology on jobs and wages depends on the:
- Technological change –> increase in productivity
- Automation –> Displacement effect
Usages of money
Why what is TFP explained? By what are the two explanations characterized?
How is Central banks’ money called?
- monetary base or high power money
- It is a liability in the CB’s balance sheet
- The base has two components, currency and reserves