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Health Economics traditionally involves two distinct strands. One focuses on the application of core  neoclassical economic theories of the firm, the consumer and the market to health-seeking behaviour  and other health issues. It suggests a role for government intervention only in the case of specific  market failures (for example externalities, asymmetric information, moral hazard, and public goods)  that distort market outcomes. The second strand is evaluation techniques, used to assess the cost effectiveness of competing health interventions.
2022
Level: beginner
Health Economics
Anwar Shaikh seeks in his lectures for alternative explanations for empirically observed macro and microeconomic patterns of economic fluctuations, price volatility, and economic development.
Level: advanced
Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis
This guide contains a collection of recommended YouTube channels and YouTube videos in the fields of economics, business and economic policy.
2024
Level: beginner
EconTube: The ultimate guide to pluralist economics channels on YouTube
A review of: [1] Intermediate Microeconomics, H.R. Varian [2] Mikrooekonomie, R.S. Pindyck, D.L. Rubinfeld [3] Grundzuege der mikrooekonomischen Theorie, J. Schumann, U. Meyer, W. Stroebele
2016
Level: beginner
The Dichotomy, Inconsistency, and Peculiar Outmodedness of the "Mainstream" Textbook
One method of economic modelling that has become increasingly popular in academia, government and the private sector is Agent Based Models, or ABM. These simulate the actions and interactions of thousands or even millions of people to try to understand the economy – for this reason ABM was once described to me as being “like Sim City without the graphics”. One advantage of ABM is that it is flexible, since you can choose how many agents there are (an agent just means some kind of 'economic decision maker' like a firm, consumer, worker or government); how they behave (do they use complicated or simple rules to make decisions?); as well as the environment they act in, then just run the simulation and see what happens as they interact over time.
2020
Level: beginner
Agents, agents everywhere
International Economics, 15e continues to combine rigorous economic analysis with attention to the issues of economic policy that are alive and important today in this field.
2011
Level: advanced
International Economics
This course introduces students to the relevance of gender relations in economics as a discipline and in economic processes and outcomes.
2015
Level: beginner
Gender relations and Economics
This essay deals with the concepts of Sustainable Land Management (SLM) and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN).
2018
Level: beginner
The importance of a Land Degradation Neutrality approach to achieving Sustainable Land Management
Participants should be able to distinguish the strictly non-cooperative (methodological individualist) foundations of traditional neoclassical economics as being couched in self-interested individuals, as well as having basic knowledge of an alternative set of theories based on the primacy cooperation and social norms and extending the breadth of economic analysis beyond exchange.
2021
Level: beginner
Cooperative Economics
Recovery from the Covid-19 crisis provides a chance to implement economic measures that are also beneficial from environmental and social perspectives. While ‘green’ recovery packages are crucial to support economies tracking a low-carbon transition in the short-term, green measures such as carbon pricing are also key to improving welfare in the long-term. This commentary specifies the need for carbon pricing, outlines its implications for our everyday lives, and explains how it works alongside value-based change in the context of climate action and societal well-being.
2021
Level: beginner
Carbon Pricing: The Key to Open the Way Toward a Sustainable Recovery and Long-Term Wellbeing
This lecture briefly discusses historic understandings of the limits to infinite economic growth on a finite planet (from John Stuart Mill to Marx). Taking a ecological economics perspective it discusses the metabolism of the economy, the economy as a subsystem of the environment, biophysical limits to growth, and sustainable economic scales.
2021
Level: beginner
Ecological Limits to Growth
Economics for Emancipation (E4E) is a seven-module introductory curriculum with interactive and participatory workshops. It offers a deep critical dive into the current political economic system, exploration of alternative economic systems, and dynamic tools to dream and build the economy that centers care, relationship, and liberation.
2023
Level: beginner
Economics for Emancipation
The bestselling classic that examines the history of economic thought from Adam Smith to Karl Marx—“all the economic lore most general readers conceivably could want to know, served up with a flourish” (The New York Times). The Worldly Philosophers not only enables us to see more deeply into our history but helps us better understand our own times. In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbroner provides a new theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
1999
Level: beginner
The Worldly Philosophers
As the current economic crisis spreads around the globe questions are being asked about what king of capitalist or post-capitalist economy will follow. There is increasing talk of the need for stringent economic regulation, the need to temper greed and individualism, to make the economy work for human and social development.
2009
Level: advanced
The Social Economy
This course is an introduction to Development Economics and is concerned with how economists have sought to explain how the process of economic growth occurs, and how – or whether – that delivers improved well-being of people.
2015
Level: advanced
Development Economics
Until the end of the early 1970s, from a history of economic thought perspective, the mainstream in economics was pluralist, but once neoclassical economics became totally dominant it claimed the mainstream as its own. Since then, alternative views and schools of economics increasingly became minorities in the discipline and were considered 'heterodox'.
2016
Level: advanced
Reclaiming Pluralism in Economics
If there’s one method economists have neglected the most, it’s qualitative research. Whereas economists favour mathematical models and statistics, qualitative research seeks to understand the world through intensive investigation of particular circumstances, which usually entails interviewing people directly about their experiences. While this may sound simple to quantitative types the style, purpose, context, and interpretation of an interview can vary widely. Because of this variety, I have written a longer post than usual on this topic rather than doing it a disservice. Having said that, examples of qualitative research in economics are sadly scant enough that it doesn’t warrant multiple posts. In this post I will introduce qualitative research in general with nods to several applications including the study of firm behaviour, race, Austrian economics, and health economics. More than usual I will utilise block quotes, which I feel is in the spirit of the topic.
2020
Level: beginner
Qualitative Methods in Economics: "You Can Observe a Lot Just by Watching"
Mainstream inflation theories in economics do little to explain the recent acceleration in price increases. The associated economic policy recommendations further increase the misery of low-income groups.
2023
Level: beginner
The inflation conundrum
Thirty-years of economic transformation has turned China into one of the major players in the global capitalist economy. However, its economic growth has generated rising problems in inequality, alienation, and sustainability with the agrarian crises of the 1990s giving rise to real social outcry to the extent that they became the object of central government policy reformulations.
2015
Level: advanced
Social Economy in China and the World
Microeconomics in Context lays out the principles of microeconomics in a manner that is thorough, up to date, and relevant to students. Like its counterpart, Macroeconomics in Context, the book is uniquely attuned to economic realities. The "in Context" books offer affordability, accessible presentation, and engaging coverage of current policy issues from economic inequality and global climate change to taxes.
2013
Level: advanced
Microeconomics in Context
Economic development is a process of continuous technological innovation and structural transformation. Development thinking is inherently tied to the quest for sustainable growth strategies. This book provides a neoclassical approach for studying the determinants of economic structure and its transformation and draws new insights for development policy.
2012
Level: advanced
New Structural Economics
Economics: A New Introduction provides a fresh introduction to real economics. Highlighting the complex and changing nature of economic activity, this wide-ranging text employs a pragmatic mix of old and new methods to examine the role of values and theoretical beliefs in economic life and in economists’ understanding of it.
1999
Level: beginner
Economics
“Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses1.” This is how Lionel Robbins came to define economics in the early 1930s and there is a good chance that many of you heard a variant of this definition in your first Economics 101 lecture.
2021
Level: beginner
What is “Economics”?
The Wealth of Ideas traces the history of economic thought, from its prehistory (the Bible, Classical antiquity) to the present day.
2005
Level: beginner
The Wealth of Ideas
In this essay the authors argue for a wider concept of care work that includes community building, civic engagement and environmental activism. On the basis of the case of Cargonomia, a grassroot initiative in Budapest, they show that such a wider concept of care work could allow for different narratives that promote sustainable lifestyles with a milder environmental and social impact on the planet and its communities.
2019
Level: beginner
Reimagining the world of (care)work: the case of Cargonomia
The text presents a short perspective of International Political Economy, which "have often sought to complement discussions of governance with a healthy dose of critique", on resistance against e.g. economic inequality or economic and political power.
2017
Level: beginner
Resistance
John K. Galbraith tells the economic history of a couple of economies (mostly UK, US and to a lesser extent Germany) from the end of the first world war until the Bretton Woods conference. He also provides a biography of John M. Keynes and outlines some central ideas of Keynes such as the possibility of an underemployment equilibrium. Galbraith complements the historical remarks by the biographical experiences he made in economic management (and in engaging with Keynes) serving as deputy head of the Office for Price administration during the second world war.
1977
Level: beginner
The Age of Uncertainty Episode 7 The Mandarin Revolution
Mark Blyth criticises the political inability to solve the persistent economic crisis in Europe against the background of a deflationary environment. Ideological blockades and impotent institutions are the mutually reinforcing causes of European stagnation. The deeper roots lie in the structural change of the economic system since the 1980s, when neoliberalism emerged as hegemonic ideology. This ideology prepared the ground for austerity and resulting deflationary pressures and a strategy of all seeking to export their way out of trouble. Worryingly this is breeding populist and nationalist resentments in Europe.
2015
Level: beginner
Policies to avert stagnation: The Crisis and the Future(s) of the Euro
In this short Video Silke Helfrich discusses the basics of commons. It’s an introduction into the essence of commons from a perspective stemming from outside the economic discipline that focuses on social practice. Her perception challenges the economic mainstream’s perception of common goods and goes beyond a purely materialistic conceptualisation of commons.
2014
Level: beginner
The Basics of Commons
The likely global impacts of the economic fallout from the Coronavirus and how we might be better prepared than the 2008 economic crisis to put forward progressive solutions.
2020
Level: beginner
The coming global recession: building an internationalist response
In this one-on-one interview, co-host Gerardo Serra talks with Felwine Sarr, author of Afrotopia (2016) and professor of economics at Gaston Berger University in Senegal. Topics include the relevance (or lack thereof) of development economics to conditions in African economies, the significance of African philosophy for thinking about the economic problems of the continent, and the status of the field of history of economic thought in Africa.
2018
Level: beginner
Smith and Marx Walk into a Bar - A History of Economics Podcast
This brief note explores the possibility of working towards an enlarged self-definition of economics through economists’ study and appreciation of economic sociology. Common ground between economic sociology and heterodox economics is explored, and some of Richard Sennett’s ideas are used as prompts to raise some pertinent and hopefully interesting questions about economics. In particular, the note revisits the question of whether there is a possibility of changing our understanding of what kind of social scientific work falls within the domain of economics proper once we start critically engaging with work conventionally considered to be outside of that domain. In part, the note is intended to offer undergraduate students in economics – and possibly even those further down the road in their education – food for thought about what constitutes economics.
2016
Level: advanced
On the Possibility of an Enlarged Self-Definition of Economics

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