Macroeconomics in Ecological Context

About this book

Natural resources have been a recurring subject of public interest, from the environmental awakening in and the oil crises of the later 20th century, to wide swings in oil prices and increased concern about climate change in the first decades of the 21st century. Standard macroeconomics books treat resources in passing, in an ad hoc manner, if at all. This text integrates resources into the model from the ground up, allowing a more logically consistent understanding of the economic effects of changed resource availability. But the underlying structure remains mostly traditional: a full-employment perspective on the long run and a Keynesian approach to business-cycle fluctuations. This provides an easier adaptation for instructors and gives students the tools to understand economic analysis done in a more conventional framework. The business-cycle material starts with a "natural history" of money to help students see the connections between social and physical phenomena.

Contents

Part I Building Blocks
1. The Economy in the World
2. Resources and Economic Processes
3. Key Variables

Part II The Long-run Model
4. Labor, Resources, and the Production Function
5. The Composition of Output
6. The Long-run Model (the Classical World)
7. Growth with Abundant Resources

Part III Business Cycles
8. A Natural History of Money
9. What Money Is
10 Banking
11 Expenditure Multipliers
12. Monetary Policy
13. Fiscal Policy
14. The IS and LM Curves
15. Policy and Shocks in the IS-LM World
16. Short-run Aggregate Supply / Aggregate Demand and Policy
17 Policy Assessment
18. The Standard Model and Alternative Perspectives
19. Resource Constraints
20. Growth under Resource Constraints
21. Business Cycles under Resource Constraints
22. Continuity and New Directions

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