Ap Macroeconomics Pdf
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Thomas J Catalano is a CFP and Registered Investment Adviser with the state of South Carolina, where he launched his own financial advisory firm in 2018. Thomas' experience gives him expertise in a variety of areas including investments, retirement, insurance, and financial planning.
It is common to find the phrase ceterus paribus, loosely translated as "all else being equal," in economic theories and discussions. Economists use this phrase to focus on specific relationships between variables being discussed, while assuming all other variables remain fixed.
The most important concept in all of macroeconomics is said to be output, which refers to the total amount of good and services a country produces. Output is often considered a snapshot of an economy at a given moment.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole.[1] This includes national, regional, and global economies.[2][3] Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP (gross domestic product) and national income, unemployment (including unemployment rates), price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
Macroeconomics and microeconomics are the two most general fields in economics.[4] The focus of macroeconomics is often on a country (or larger entities like the whole world) and how its markets interact to produce large-scale phenomena that economists refer to as aggregate variables. In microeconomics the focus of analysis is often a single market, such as whether changes in supply or demand are to blame for price increases in the oil and automotive sectors. From introductory classes in "principles of economics" through doctoral studies, the macro/micro divide is institutionalized in the field of economics. Most economists identify as either macro- or micro-economists.
Macroeconomics is traditionally divided into topics along different time frames: the analysis of short-term fluctuations over the business cycle, the determination of structural levels of variables like inflation and unemployment in the medium (i.e. unaffected by short-term deviations) term, and the study of long-term economic growth. It also studies the consequences of policies targeted at mitigating fluctuations like fiscal or monetary policy, using taxation and government expenditure or interest rates, respectively, and of policies that can affect living standards in the long term, e.g. by affecting growth rates.
Macroeconomics as a separate field of research and study is generally recognized to start in 1936, when John Maynard Keynes published his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but its intellectual predecessors are much older. Since World War II, various macroeconomic schools of thought like Keynesians, monetarists, new classical and new Keynesian economists have made contributions to the development of the macroeconomic research mainstream.
Economists interested in long-run increases in output study economic growth. Advances in technology, accumulation of machinery and other capital, and better education and human capital, are all factors that lead to increased economic output over time. However, output does not always increase consistently over time. Business cycles can cause short-term drops in output called recessions. Economists look for macroeconomic policies that prevent economies from slipping into either recessions or overheating and that lead to higher productivity levels and standards of living.
Cyclical unemployment occurs when growth stagnates. Okun's law represents the empirical relationship between unemployment and short-run GDP growth.[8] The original version of Okun's law states that a 3% increase in output would lead to a 1% decrease in unemployment.[9]
The structural or natural rate of unemployment is the level of unemployment that will occur in a medium-run equilibrium, i.e. a situation with a cyclical unemployment rate of zero. There may be several reasons why there is some positive unemployment level even in a cyclically neutral situation, which all have their foundation in some kind of market failure:[6]
A general price increase across the entire economy is called inflation. When prices decrease, there is deflation. Economists measure these changes in prices with price indexes. Inflation will increase when an economy becomes overheated and grows too quickly. Similarly, a declining economy can lead to decreasing inflation and even in some cases deflation.
Central bankers conducting monetary policy usually have as a main priority to avoid too high inflation, typically by adjusting interest rates. High inflation as well as deflation can lead to increased uncertainty and other negative consequences, in particular when the inflation (or deflation) is unexpected. Consequently, most central banks aim for a positive, but stable and not very high inflation level.[5]
The monetarist quantity theory of money holds that changes in the price level are directly caused by changes in the money supply.[16] Whereas there is empirical evidence that there is a long-run positive correlation between the growth rate of the money stock and the rate of inflation, the quantity theory has proved unreliable in the short- and medium-run time horizon relevant to monetary policy and is abandoned as a practical guideline by most central banks today.[17]
Open economy macroeconomics deals with the consequences of international trade in goods, financial assets and possibly factor markets like labor migration and international relocation of firms (physical capital). It explores what determines import, export, the balance of trade and over longer horizons the accumulation of net foreign assets. An important topic is the role of exchange rates and the pros and cons of maintaining a fixed exchange rate system or even a currency union like the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union, drawing on the research literature on optimum currency areas.[5]
In particular, macroeconomic questions before Keynes were the topic of the two long-standing traditions of business cycle theory and monetary theory. William Stanley Jevons was one of the pioneers of the first tradition, whereas the quantity theory of money, labelled the oldest surviving theory in economics, as an example of the second was described already in the 16th century by Martn de Azpilcueta and later discussed by personalities like John Locke and David Hume. In the first decades of the 20th century monetary theory was dominated by the eminent economists Alfred Marshall, Knut Wicksell and Irving Fisher.[18]
Friedman also challenged the original simple Phillips curve relationship between inflation and unemployment. Friedman and Edmund Phelps (who was not a monetarist) proposed an "augmented" version of the Phillips curve that excluded the possibility of a stable, long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment.[20] When the oil shocks of the 1970s created a high unemployment and high inflation, Friedman and Phelps were vindicated. Monetarism was particularly influential in the early 1980s, but fell out of favor when central banks found the results disappointing when trying to target money supply instead of interest rates as monetarists recommended, concluding that the relationships between money growth, inflation and real GDP growth are too unstable to be useful in practical monetary policy making.[21]
The global financial crisis leading to the Great Recession led to major reassessment of macroeconomics, which as a field generally had neglected the potential role of financial institutions in the economy. After the crisis, macroeconomic researchers have turned their attention in several new directions:
Stabilization policy is usually implemented through two sets of tools: fiscal and monetary policy. Both forms of policy are used to stabilize the economy, i.e. limiting the effects of the business cycle by conducting expansive policy when the economy is in a recession or contractive policy in the case of overheating.[5][38]
Central banks conduct monetary policy mainly by adjusting short-term interest rates.[39] The actual method through which the interest rate is changed differs from central bank to central bank, but typically the implementation happens either directly via administratively changing the central bank's own offered interest rates or indirectly via open market operations.[40]
Via the monetary transmission mechanism, interest rate changes affect investment, consumption, asset prices like stock prices and house prices, and through exchange rate reactions export and import. In this way aggregate demand, employment and ultimately inflation is affected.[41] Expansionary monetary policy lowers interest rates, increasing economic activity, whereas contractionary monetary policy raises interest rates. In the case of a fixed exchange rate system, interest rate decisions together with direct intervention by central banks on exchange rate dynamics are major tools to control the exchange rate.[42]
In developed countries, most central banks follow inflation targeting, focusing on keeping medium-term inflation close to an explicit target, say 2%, or within an explicit range. This includes the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, which are generally considered to follow a strategy very close to inflation targeting, even though they do not officially label themselves as inflation targeters.[43] In practice, an official inflation targeting often leaves room for the central bank to also help stabilize output and employment, a strategy known as "flexible inflation targeting".[44] Most emerging economies focus their monetary policy on maintaining a fixed exchange rate regime, aligning their currency with one or more foreign currencies, typically the US dollar or the euro.[45]
Conventional monetary policy can be ineffective in situations such as a liquidity trap. When nominal interest rates are near zero, central banks cannot loosen monetary policy through conventional means. In that situation, they may use unconventional monetary policy such as quantitative easing to help stabilize output. Quantity easing can be implemented by buying not only government bonds, but also other assets such as corporate bonds, stocks, and other securities. This allows lower interest rates for a broader class of assets beyond government bonds. A similar strategy is to lower long-term interest rates by buying long-term bonds and selling short-term bonds to create a flat yield curve, known in the US as Operation Twist.[46]