University of Bristol - EFIM10010: Economic Principles

This unit aims to equip students with the basic understanding of the core of economic theory, concepts and models, with applications, where appropriate, to accounting, business and finance. It provides core economics training, which will be built upon within units in subsequent years of your undergraduate programme.

Students will be able to:

• Make appropriate use of core microeconomic concepts such as opportunity cost; elasticities; and marginal/average relationships in analysing economic behaviour.
• Explain the role and limits of markets and the public sector in the organisation of economic activity, showing an awareness of the relevance of imperfect competition, strategic behaviour, informational constraints, regulation and externalities in economic activity.
• Analyse the behaviour of firms in a variety of forms of industrial organisation.
• Explain the contributions that economic analysis can make to addressing some problems of current concern such as pollution and unemployment.
• Explain important macroeconomic concepts such as Gross Domestic Product, money supply, inflation, natural rate of unemployment, aggregate supply and exchange rates.
• Analyse the behaviour of major macroeconomic variables such as aggregate output and the interest rate using models of aggregate economic behaviour.
• Recognise some of the causes of aggregate economic fluctuations using simple models.
• Appraise the scope and limitations of both fiscal and monetary policy.