Economics

This course offers a dynamic exploration of the current and emerging regulatory frameworks guiding Digital Finance or FinTech. It closely examines how laws and regulations across key markets, including the UK, EU, and US, are adapting, striving for a balance between fostering innovation and mitigating risks.

International trade as a field of economics has changed a lot in the past two decades. Previously, we employ some toy models to understand the principles of international trade. These principles are insightful, but they cannot provide us tools to understand the issues in practice. The recent decades development in international trade has shifted the focus from the earlier intensely discussed principles to more practical, sophisticate observations in international trade. We employ recently available data at firm level or transaction level to understand trade intermediary, finance, R&D, resource allocation, firm dynamics, offshoring, etc. These recent developments in international research is important for us to fully understand how a world with open economies works and how some most important movements of factors, goods and services affect our welfare. The objective of this course is to guide undergraduate students from understanding some basic international economics principles to try to investigate and understand how exactly international trade in practice is conducted and shape the world.

This course introduces students to the key ideas of Game Theory and strategic thinking, allowing them to use game theoretic tools to analyze real world problems. Students see applications in industrial organization, auctions, competition and cooperation, voting, solving environment problems, and arms races.

This introduction to Natural Resource Economics examines the scarcity and optimal allocation of freshwater resources in the Western Cape, South Africa. The theoretical framework is neo-classical microeconomics, market failure, and climate change are being addressed. Assessment: tests and essays (40%), final examination (60%).

This course is directed advanced Bachelor students as a way of learning about the role of the state economic policies (especially fiscal policies) in the economy in a manner that combines theoretical and empirical learning with practical experiences, case studies, debates and most of all much student engagement. It conveys a sound economic and policy understanding regarding the role of the state and public expenditure, including at the multilateral level. This includes theoretical and empirical concepts and extensive applications and policy discussion on the history of public spending, government “performance” and reform, fiscal sustainability and fiscal risks, financing constraints for government, and the role of fiscal rules from a comparative international perspective. It would also include three sessions on international public goods, their financing and the role of multilateral development banks (MDBs).

This course explores the microeconomic foundations of development economics. Students discuss topics such as poverty traps, labor markets, human capital, gender, public goods/service delivery and taxation, infrastructure, among others. In studying each of these topics, students ask: what determines decision-making in low- and middle-income countries? What constraints do agents face? Is there scope to improve livelihoods through the actions of market participants, governments, international organizations (e.g. World Bank) and NGOs? What policies have been tried in different countries and how have they fared? This course places emphasis on developing analytical understanding of applied issues, while combining theory and empirical evidence. 

The twenty-first century is an age of unprecedented globalization. To better understand globalization, the course introduces the core models of international trade: Ricardian Model, the specific-factors model, and the Heckscher-Ohlin model. The course also deals with the research frontier by explaining how increasing returns and product differentiation affect trade and welfare. Finally, the course is devoted to understanding trade policy.

Prerequisite: ECO2102 Microeconomics

Exploring advanced theories used to understand financial markets in the context of corporate borrowing and lending, students discuss financing frictions that differentiate the functioning of perfect and imperfect capital markets. They then build on these theories to understand security design and the process of security issuance in equity markets. By applying the course material students evaluate corporate risk management and hedging, understand the role of corporate control, and the interaction of control rights and cash flow rights.

This course provides a largely non-technical introduction to the basic concepts and methods used by economists to understand and explain the features of the world economy today. Students explore globalization of trade and finance; the emergence of global value chains and the rise of China and India; and the winners and losers of globalization within rich and developing economies.