A Date for Your Diary - Cambridge in November!
The Moller Centre in Cambridge has become one of our best-loved venues in recent years and we are returning there on Monday 23rd November for our ‘Energising the Economics Classroom’ conference. I am putting together the programme over the next few weeks but the theme of the day will be based around utilising new technologies in teaching Economics - in particular Web 2.0 media and macroeconomic simulation games. We hope to have an exciting announcement to make on this in the near future.
The Moller Centre has just been voted as the top business training venue in the United Kingdom, it is a wonderfully relaxing place to be and there are seventy very well equipped and peaceful study bedrooms on site for delegates wanting to stay before the conference and recharge the batteries. As is customary, tutor2u will be hosting an informal supper for bed and breakfast delegates on the Sunday night - the food at the Moller is excellent! - and there will be a free minibus service for delegates to get to the station immediately after the conference has concluded.
This is a weekend in the academic calendar that I always look forward to and we hope to see many of you there - old friends and new ones - in November! Provisional bookings can now be made - please give the tutor2u office a ring and let the girls know whether you would like to also stay on the Sunday night.
The Temptation of Competitive Devaluations
For our A2 macroeconomics teaching, we are moving into a study of exchange rate economics and the impact that currency movements have on key variables such as real output, profits, jobs, trade balances and living standards.
The decisions that countries make about exchange rate regimes can have a lasting effect on their macroeconomic performance. One topic in the news at the moment is the issue of whether individual countries - facing severe and painful downturns - will opt to use the exchange rate more aggressively as a tool of economic management. Today’s Independent has an interesting paragraph:
“Sterling has lost 8.1 per cent versus the dollar and 5 per cent against the euro this week alone, and is one-third down on its international value of a year ago. The G7 is said to be ready to discuss the pound’s precipitous decline, amid fears that the world could fall into a series of competitive devaluations”
Competitive devaluations occur when a country deliberately intervenes in foreign exchange markets to drive down the external value of the currency to provide a competitive boost to their international trade industries. For nations with persistent trade deficits and rising unemployment this can become an attractive option - but there are risks. I recommend that A2 economists read ”What’s really wrong with Sterling? - The pound is suffering its worst ever fall in value. Why is it happening and what are the implications? Edmund Conway, Telegraph Economics Editor, has the answers.
Jeremy Warner’s comment piece in the Independent on exchange rates and the risks of protectionism is also worth a look.
AS Macroeconomics Revision - Key Term Revision Bank
This interactive revision resource tests whether students can match a definition from AS Macroeconomics to one of five key terms. Each time you take the quiz, the resource selects 10 definitions from our database. Please allow 5-10 seconds for the quiz to load as it selects a new set of definitions from the server!
Launch AS Macroeconomics Key Term Revision Bank
Martin Wolf on Keynes
Essential reading ...... I am about to watch the Carols from King’s Cambridge on the television .... and John Maynard would have been proud to read such an erudite and clear discussion of the essence of the Keynesian contribution to macroeconomics.
A sickness at the heart of Britain
The Observer today ran a special series of articles on the credit crunch - an excellent collection and one that ought to be of value for A2 students studying macroeconomics.
The special reports can be found here:
Similar special reports available from
Financial Times: Global Financial Crisis
I hear that there are some leading city figures who make sure that their teams read Hamish McRae each Monday - the quality of his writing is superb and today was no exception:
“It won’t be the Great Depression all over again – or even the ‘70s or ‘80s”
Darling lays on the pessimism extra thick!
It is manna from heaven for the Chancellor to give Economics teachers such a juicy headline to work with right at the start of teaching a macroeconomics course because it allows us to ask students just how we measure the performance of an economy and test the extent to which this is perhaps the most profound downturn in the post-war period?
GDP growth is stagnant, inflation is more than double the government’s own target of 2% 9with inflationary expectations also heading north) and unemployment as measured by the claimant count and the labour force survey is starting to pick up fast amid a wave of redundancies.
But even a cursory glance at macroeconomic data stretching back to the 1950s and 1960s tells us straight away that the economy is not in the same perilous position than it was in the stagflationary days of the 1970s and early 1980s.
read more...»Old enough to remember?
Those of us who are getting a bit long in the tooth tend to regard events of say a decade ago as pretty recent - so the eleven years that have passed since the Bank of England was made independent seem to have come and gone in a flash! The departure from the ERM in 1992 (can you remember what you were doing that night?) and the end of the dot-com boom also fit into that category for this author!
But for our new students who begin their study of economics in September, these landmark, perhaps watershed events are a dim and very distant memory if at all. I was reminded of this when reading the excellent Guardian editorial today “From boom to doom and gloom”. which ends up calling for the fiscal rules to be relaxed in the current fall out from the credit crunch.
When we start teaching again in September the economic picture will most likely have worsened somewhat ... I must remind myself to build up a collection of newspaper front page headlines in case students have forgotten to order papers for the beach! - but for most 16 and 17 year olds, all they have ever known is a growing economy and low inflation.
“Had our teenager taken an interest in economic affairs (although he or she would surely have something better to think about, like the new Will Smith film) they would know the economy was in big trouble. Yet that 16-year-old would only just have been born the last time there was a single quarter of falling national income. All they would have ever known was a growing economy.”
Macroeconomics has suddenly got a whoel lot more interesting again and it will be fascinating to hear what our students think of the best ideas and prescriptions for managing our way through 2009 - which promises to be a very difficult year for the economy.
Economics Revision Workshops Summer 2008
The programmes for our intensive one-day revision workshops for AS & A2 Economics are being finalised as we prepare for what should be a really useful series of revision days.
read more...»Revision: Expectations in Economics
Expectations are forecasts or views that decision makers hold about future prices, sales, incomes, taxes, or other key variables. Our expectations also shape today’s decisions – since expectations can become a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” There is no doubt that expectations play a really important role in determining consumer and business decisions. From speculative behaviour in commodity markets, to the carry trade in foreign exchange and to expectations of changes in tax policy, how our expectations are formed and the factors that might cause them to change matter a great deal. Students can score higher marks for critical evaluation if they bring in the concept of expectations into their discussions.
I have attached a revision mind map in pdf format on expectations in economics. There are many applications of the concept in both AS and A2 micro and macroeconomics.
The mind map includes sections on
Speculative behaviour in markets
Adaptive Expectations
Rational Expectations
Behavioural Economics
Expectations and Government Economic Policy
Expectations of inflation
Microeconomic applications of expectations
Mindmap file
Expectations.mmap
Pdf version of the mindmap
Expectations_in_Economics.pdf
Revision: Revising AS Macro for 2008
I have attached a pdf copy of the revision mind map I went through with our AS macro groups yesterday
Files to download
PDF copy of the mindmap Revising_Macro_2008.pdf
In a few days time, we will be providing some revision guides mapped to the revision resources available on the Tutor2u web site.
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