Macroeconomics for a Sustainable Planet

Unemployment. Inflation. Protectionism. Trade barriers. Fiscal deficit. These are not just terms in an economics textbook or in newspaper headlines. These real-life challenges carry societal and environmental implications for billions of people around the world. How do we balance the pursuit of economic growth with the right of all people to thrive on an increasingly fragile planet? To answer this question, we must reframe our understanding of macroeconomics in the context of a highly interdependent world.

Led by two leading economic minds – Columbia University Professor and Senior UN Advisor Jeffrey Sachs and former Chilean Minister of Finance Felipe Larraín – this massive open online course explores traditional macroeconomic principles and tools, updated for the age of sustainable development and the current wave of globalization. Is a thriving global economy possible in an equitable and environmentally thoughtful way? Find out here.

This course is for:

Graduate students and advanced undergraduate students studying international development, economics and/or sustainable development

Economists interested in the balance of macroeconomic principles and ESG (environmental, societal and governance) criteria

Sustainable development practitioners – as well as private-sector actors, such as those who work in the financial sector – who need to understand the economic models that support and depend on sustainable development

What you'll learn

• GDP and well-being: How do we measure progress? Are those measures enough?
• The changing labor market: digitization, unemployment trends,and the minimum wage
• Sustainable investment principles
• Theories of business investment and how these relate to consumption and saving
• New economic principles which internalize social capital and environmental impact
• Introduction
• Macroeconomic Pathologies
• 21st Century Perspectives on Macroeconomics
• International Comparisons of Income
• GDP & Well-Being
• Full-Employment Economy
• Deriving GDP | Part I
• Deriving GDP | Part II
• Labor & Saving | Part I
• Labor & Saving | Part II
• Economic Growth
• Partial-Employment Economy
• Business Cycles
• Aggregate Demand Management
• Problems with Aggregate Demand Management
• Output Determination in the IS-LM Model
• Labor Markets, Concepts, Definitions & Groups
• Labor Market Institutions: Minimum Wages, Unionization & Contracts
• Costs of Unemployment, Digitization of Labor, Informality & Underemployment
• Money vs. Barter: History & Concepts
• Money Demand
• Money Supply: the Role of the Central Bank
• The Central Bank: New Approaches to Monetary Policy
• Exchange Rate Arrangements
• PPP & Interest Rate Arbitrage
• The Real Exchange Rate & the Role of Non-Traded Goods
• Monetary Policy: Fixed & Floating Exchange Rates
• Currency Crises
• Bank Runs & Panics | Part I
• Bank Runs & Panics | Part II
• Preventing Bank Runs
• Bubbles & Crashes
• Managing Insolvencies
• When Governments Go Broke
• Inflation, the Fiscal Deficit & Seigniorage
• The Costs of Inflation
• Inflation, Unemployment & the Phillips Curve
• Stabilization Themes
• Consumption, Saving & the Intertemporal Budget Constraint
• Permanent Income Consumption Theory
• Life Cycle Model of Consumption & Saving
• Investment
• Basic Theory of Business Investment
• Budget, Public Revenues & Expenditures
• Saving, Investment, the Fiscal Deficit & Management of Public Debt
• Interactions Between Public & Private Sectors
• Fiscal Institutions & Policies
• Aggregate Demand in an Open Economy
• Aggregate Demand with a Flexible Exchange Rate
• Aggregate Demand with a Fixed Exchange Rate
• The Current Account & External Indebtedness
• The Intertemporal Budget Constraint of a Country
• Economic Growth in History, Patterns & Sectors
• Sources of Economic Growth
• Solow’s Growth Convergence Model
• Growth & Inequality
• Growth Traps
• What is Globalization?
• Development of the Global Economic System
• Globalization of Population Systems
• Crises of Poverty & Inequality
• Challenge of Sustainable Development