When invited by a higher educational institution committee to give my recommendation on an economics syllabus for advanced undergraduates, this was my proposal dated May 29 2000:
INTRODUCTORY ECONOMICS COURSE FOR ADVANCED UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN INDIA
Lecture 1 – Introduction to the history of economic thought, scholasticism, mercantilism, classical political economy, Marx, Keynes, modern neoclassical economics.
Lecture 2 — Introduction to India’s economy: Kautilya’s Arthasthastra, the Indian economy in ancient and medieval times, impact of British imperialism on the Indian economy, the economy after Independence: 1950-1991; post 1991.
Lectures 3-15: Introduction to Microeconomic Principles
Lecture 3 — Production, consumption and exchange; households and firms, goods and services.
Lecture 4 — Exchange between two parties without prices; Edgeworth’s Box analysis; the core of an exchange economy.
Lecture 5 — The notion of a relative price; the budget constraint of the individual household; maximization of utility subject to the budget; optimal consumption.
Lecture 6 — Consumption of the household; income-consumption curves; Engel curves; the derivation of the demand curve.
Lecture 7 — Theory of demand; aggregation of individual demand curves.
Lecture 8 — The firm in economic theory and reality; the activity analysis view of technology and production; costs and their minimisation; profits and their maximisation.
Lecture 9 — Elementary derivation of the supply curve from profit-maximisation principles. Aggregation of individual supply curves.
Lecture 10 – Market demand and supply together for a single good or service. Elementary partial equilibrium analysis.
Lecture 11 – Market equilibria of all goods and services together; elementary general equilibrium theory.
Lecture 12 – Theory of the firm revisited: cost curves, industry supply; the number of firms in an industry.
Lecture 13 — Monopoly and competition; Chamberlin’s monopolistic competition and product differentiation.
Lecture 14 – Elementary notions of game theory.
Lecture 15 — Review of microeconomics.
Lectures 16 –30 : Introduction to Macroeconomic Principles
Lecture 16 – Intertemporal models of consumption and production. Notions of savings and investment as a function of the interest rate.
Lecture 17 – Classical Wicksellian equilibrium in the market for savings and investment.
Lecture 18 – Money and its functions; the demand for money and the supply of money. Monetary equilibrium in the classical economy.
Lecture 19 – The Keynesian income-expenditure model.
Lecture 20 — The same contiued.
Lecture 21 – Basic Keynes-Hicks IS-LM model of macroeconomic equilibrium. The notion of involuntary unemployment.
Lecture 22 – The same continued. Macroeconomic aggregate supply and demand curve analysis. The working of fiscal and monetary policy in a closed economy under Classical and Keynesian assumptions.
Lecture 23 -- The same continued.
Lecture 24: The open economy. Basics of international trade.
Lecture 25 – Basics of exchange-rate and balance of payments theory.
Lecture 26 – The same continued.
Lecture 27 – Fiscal and monetary policy in an open economy.
Lecture 28 — The same continued.
Lecture 29 – Modern macroeconomic problems of inflation and unemployment.
Lecture 30 — Review of macroeconomic principles and policies.
Lecture 31-36 Introduction to Applied Economics
Lecture 31-33: Basics of National Income Accounting for India; GDP, GNP, price-series, Indian balance of payments and budget data analysis.
Lectures 34-36: Basics of demand estimation and introductory econometrics.
By a “Lecture” I mean one or more sessions over a week, so the whole course would take an academic year, whether divided in semesters or terms or quarters.
Subroto Roy
Kolkata
