Foundations of Economics

Robin Bade was an undergraduate at the University of Queensland, Australia, where she earned degrees in mathematics and economics. After a spell teaching high school math and physics, she enrolled in the PhD program at the Australian National University, from which she graduated in 1970. She has held faculty appointments at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, at Bond University in Australia, and at the Universities of Manitoba, Toronto, and Western Ontario in Canada. Her research on international capital flows appeared in the International Economic Review and the Economic Record. Robin first taught the principles of economics course in 1970 and has taught it (alongside intermediate macroeconomics and international trade and finance) most years since then. She developed many of the ideas found in this text while conducting tutorials with her students at the University of Western Ontario. Michael Parkin studied economics in England and began his university teaching career immediately after graduating with a BA from the University of Leicester. He learned the subject on the job at the University of Essex, England’s most exciting new university of the 9160s, and at the age of 30 became one of the youngest full professors. He is a past president of the Canadian Economics Association and has served on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Monetary Economics. His research on macroeconomics, monetary economics, and international economics has resulted in more than 160 publications in journals and edited volumes, including the American Economic Review, theJournal of Political Economy, theReview of Economic Studies, theJournal of Monetary Economics, and theJournal of Money, Credit, and Banking. He is the author of the best-selling Addison-Wesley textbook, Economics. Robin and Michael are a wife-and-husband duo. Their most notable joint research created the Bade-Parkin Index of central bank independence and spawned a vast amount of research on that topic. They don’t claim credit for the independence of the new European Central Bank, but its constitution and the movement toward greater independence of central banks around the world were aided by their pioneering work. They are dedicated to the challenge of explaining economics ever more clearly to an ever-growing body of students.

1. Getting Stated
2. The U.S. and Global Economies
3. The Economic Problem
4. Demand and Supply
5. Elasticities of Demand and Supply
6. Efficiency and Fairness of Markets
7. Government Actions in Markets
8. Taxes
9. Global Markets in Action
10. Public Goods and Public Choices
11. Externalities and The Environment
12. Consumer Choice and Demand
13. Production and Cost
14. Perfect Competition
15. Monopoly
16. Monopolistic Competition
17. Oligopoly
18. Markets for Factors of Production
19. Inequality and Poverty
20. GDP:  A Measure of Total Production and Income

21. Jobs and Unemployment 

22. The CPI and the Cost of Living
23. Potential GDP and the Natural Unemployment Rate
24. Economic Growth

25. Finance, Saving, and Investment
26. The Monetary System
27. Money, Interest, and Inflation
28. Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand

29. Aggregate Expenditure
30. The Short-Run Policy Tradeoff
31. Fiscal Policy
32. Monetary Policy
33. International Finance