Scarcity, Choice and the World Economy

Economics begins with scarcity: people, firms and governments want more than the available land, labor, capital and time can produce, so every choice carries an opportunity cost, the value of the best alternative given up. The global economy is simply this problem played out across borders, as roughly two hundred countries with very different resources trade goods, services, money and ideas.

Because resources are distributed unevenly, a country rich in farmland but short of factories faces different trade-offs from a crowded island with skilled workers and few minerals. Exchange lets each place escape some of its own limits, which is why trade, investment and migration have grown so large. At the same time, economic choices create winners and losers, so economists ask both how to make the overall pie larger and how that pie is shared.

This course moves from measuring economies to trade, money, institutions, development, supply chains and crises.