Economic Concepts in Policy Analysis

This course introduces the core economic ideas that underpin policy analysis, with an emphasis on intuition, interpretation, and application rather than formal mathematical modeling. The course familiarizes students with key microeconomic and macroeconomic concepts such as incentives, tradeoffs, market failures, externalities, public goods, growth, inflation, and unemployment, and examines how these ideas shape the analysis of public problems and policy choices.

Through applied examples and policy-focused discussion, students learn to think from an economic perspective, read and assess economically informed arguments, and use economic reasoning to better understand policy design, evaluation, and debate.