100% satisfaction guarantee Immediately available after payment Both online and in PDF No strings attached
logo-home
Lecture samenvatting Microeconomics $5.96   Add to cart

Summary

Lecture samenvatting Microeconomics

 15 views  0 purchase
  • Course
  • Institution

Here a summary of the course microeconomics and lectures, including examples

Preview 3 out of 25  pages

  • March 3, 2021
  • 25
  • 2020/2021
  • Summary
avatar-seller
Lecture 1
Microeconomics, institutions and welfare

Economic development
GDP- gross domestic product – all the goods and services that are produced in a country (all
of the production is included).

-Question> What do you think about GDP as a measure of living standards?

GDP and equality- The GDP as an average measure per capita for a country, doesn’t take
equality in account. GDP doesn’t capture inequality.

-Question> What do you think about happiness as a measure of living standards?

Countries where there’s a lot of equality score very high on the report of life satisfaction.

-Why not use this happiness meter (from the lecture> ladder) to measure economic
development?

Happiness is strongly correlated with people’s emotional situation at that particular time. It’s
a nice objective but there a lot of concerns, we have to take in account if we want to develop a
good measure of the welfare and development in society.

The technological revolution

Technology: Is a process that uses inputs to produce an output.

Around the time of the 1700s/ 1800s some remarkable scientific and technological advances
occurred around the same time as the upward kick in the hockeystick in Britain. These
technological improvements changed the living standards of people a lot.

Because technology was available people were able to produce at similar levels, the same
output with similar inputs in a much shorter time. This implied that the amount of work time
that was needed to produce certain things really reduced.

The industrial revolution

Industrial revolution: a wave of technological advances starting in Britain in the 18th century,
which transformed an agrarian and craft-based economy into a commercial and industrial
economy. Example> the productivity of labour in producing light is half a million time
greater than it was among our ancestors with a campfire.

Communication revolution?
Technological progress also greatly improved the speed at which information travels.

The Capitalist revolution
Capitalism (= the idea that there was an ownership over large amount of capital) led to growth
in living standards because:
- specialization: The growth of firms and the expansion of markets linking the entire world

,allowed historically unprecedented specialization in tasks and production. Specialization is
possible when people can acquire other goods via the market.

The fact that there was capital meant that firms could grow and expand markets (firms started
to compete in markets and needed to develop technologies to deliver superior, to reach
quantities but also to deliver products)
 Impact on technology: Firms competing in markets had strong incentives to adopt
and develop new technologies
-learning by doing
- taking advantages of natural differences in skill and talent
-economies of scale
Together with the technological revolution, this increased worker productivity.

Differences in capitalism’s success due to:
1. Ownership/ property laws 2. Competitiveness of markets 3. Quality of institutions.

What is economics?
Economics is about scarcity and economics is about economic agents allocate scarce
resources to maximize their utility/profit/output.

Economics is the study of how people interact with each other and with their natural
surroundings in producing their livelihoods, and how this changes over time.

This is the same for firms and household, your time and money constrained and you have to
decide what you’re going to spend you’re time and money on. You have many options and
you have to make decisions which you do based on you’re preferences and beliefs. We can
see these households and firms as production units.




Why did the Industrial Revolution happen first in the 18th Century, on an island off the coast
of Europe, and why not in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Japan, or Canada?

There are many alternative explanations:
 relatively high cost of labour and cheap local sources of energy
 Europe’s scientific revolution and Enlightenment
 political and cultural characteristics of nations as a whole
 cultural attributes such as hard work and savings
 abundance of coal and access to colonies

modelling technology
technology: A process that uses inputs to produce an output.
• Firms choose between technologies (specific combinations of inputs) to produce outputs.
• Some technologies are dominated by other technologies.

, Isoquant: All input combinations that yield the same output (= minimum required quantity of
inputs)

MRTS: Amount by which the quantity of an input can be reduced when one extra unit of
another input is used, so that output remains constant.
The ease with which one input can be replaced by one or more units of the other in- put while
holding production constant, is reflected in the slope of the curve.
MRTS = −∆K/∆L = MPL/MPK

The derivative (= it tells us how function changes as a
resolved of a change in X)- How foes a function f (x)
change as a function of a change in x?




MRTS of labour for capital is the amount by which capital can be reduced when one extra
unit of labour is used.

technological difference: Reflected in the different slopes of the curves.

Firms>
-Firms aim to maximize their profit, which means producing cloth at the least possible cost.

The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:

Guaranteed quality through customer reviews

Guaranteed quality through customer reviews

Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.

Quick and easy check-out

Quick and easy check-out

You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.

Focus on what matters

Focus on what matters

Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!

Frequently asked questions

What do I get when I buy this document?

You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.

Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?

Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.

Who am I buying these notes from?

Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller jolieosinga5. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.

Will I be stuck with a subscription?

No, you only buy these notes for $5.96. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.

Can Stuvia be trusted?

4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)

79202 documents were sold in the last 30 days

Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy study notes for 14 years now

Start selling
$5.96
  • (0)
  Add to cart