Economics

The purpose of this course is to provide adequate perspectives and concepts for the exploration of the dynamic implications of the interactions between the economy and the environment. The aim is to enable students to understand clearly how the many actions and forces embedded in the economy-environment system interact with each other to give rise to actual and potential conflicts between economic growth and environmental sustainability, the resulting environmental external costs arising from environment-economy interactions, and their implications for planning and administering a delicate balancing act between economic and environmental sustainability. The course also seeks to enhance students’ mastery of coordinate and practical knowledge of sustainability management by tying learning and knowledge from different domains to environmental economic issues in real-life situations. This is intended to develop students’ critical thinking and cross-disciplinary analytical skills in problem-solving which is key to academic and career advancement.
 

The course then discusses the structure of environmental value; the relationship between value orientation or value-belief norm theory in environmental choices and economic preferences; the economic and environmental assumptions governing the costs and benefits of growth and environmental sustainability; the properties of natural capital, and their implications for environmental and resource conservation, among other subjects of interest.

Based on a historical approach, this course questions the various theoretical models of development and their extensions in economic policy. It discusses the various "developmental" approaches of the 1950s and 1970s which made underdevelopment an international problem and whose solution must be found at the national level. It then examines the vision adopted from the 1980s onwards which saw it as a national problem to be tackled at the international level, leading to a homogenization of development strategies underlying structural adjustment. Finally, faced with the (at least relative) failure of the various decades of development, and while underdevelopment remains one of the major issues of the 21st century, the course considers the current focus on reducing poverty and inequality, while the concept of sustainable development is being promoted.

Public Economics analyzes the market failure and the function of the government, specifically what the government should do in a market economy. This course covers the basic principle of public economics, especially the role of the government and the rationale for the policy, in a framework of applied microeconomics. The course teaches the standard approach of public economics, which is the foundation of economic analysis in any policy issue. It assumes that students are familiar and comfortable with basic concepts of microeconomics that includes, for example, the method of Lagrange multiplier and Slutsky Equation.

This course introduces students to the field of environmental economics. They discuss and analyze how markets, without policy intervention, fail to capture environmental externalities. They then discuss the possible regulatory measures and policy instruments available to correct such market failures yielding what might be the socially optimal level of pollution. The course introduces various environmental valuation techniques that help identifying the costs and benefits of controlling environmental externalities. 

This course provides students an introduction to recent developments in the migration and job search literature. Students learn how to formulate and solve dynamic models, and apply these models to analyze a range of topics including migration, employment transitions, and wage dispersion across workers. Throughout the course, analysis is linked to the current debate on migration and other labor market policies.

The course introduces the topic of monetary systems in theory and in practice. It focuses on how today's international monetary systems have developed historically and, in particular, how today's monetary system may facilitate or impede the transition to a sustainable economy.

This course covers three main areas of major content. The first is the development history of economic development issues; the second is the analysis of factors of economic development, including economic growth theory, economic development and capital accumulation, economic development and human capital, economic development and resources and environment, etc.; the third is the structural changes of economic development, mainly including dual structure and its evolution, industrial structure evolution, etc.

It expands the knowledge of students of related majors and provides them with basic theories, research methods and analytical tools related to economic development for their future research on issues involving economic development or for their work related to economic and social development.

This course introduces economic analysis of the government sector using microeconomic tools. It covers principles and policies concerning both tax and expenditure and analyzes the effects of fiscal actions on efficiency in resource allocation and on equity. The course also examines analytical tools and policy applications particularly as they relate to budgetary policies in Singapore. 

This course provides an intermediate level of game theory. Game theory considers rational decision-making in interactive situations. This course defines what these interactive situations are, and the rationality under these situations. In particular, the class uses a new approach to analyze experimental data of people’s decisions in economic/interactive environments. This new approach quantitates the degree of people’s rationality while the standard game theory and economic theory assume ‘super-rational decision-makers.’

This course explores various concepts of economic inequality, including a consideration of measurement and data issues. It reviews key theories about the relationship between economic inequality and economic development, including the causes and consequences of inequality levels.