Anthropogenic climate change perhaps is the biggest challenge that humanity faces today. The United Nations declared that climate change is a global emergency that goes beyond national borders. Climate change affects the national economies throughout the world and governments are challenged by its consequences. This course looks at how the policy can solve the problems around climate change impacts, and the design of mitigation and adaptation plans. All available scientific evidence shows that Central Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions to this change.
The course builds on key concepts from environmental and natural resource economics but also draws from other fields in economics. The course is based on published articles and grey literature for country-relevant case studies. The course consists of three parts: 1) The impact of climate change in the world and the Central Asian region; 2) Economics tools for climate change and 3) Current and future country policies with respect to climate change. The aim of the course is to equip students with tools to assess climate policy.
Course Description:
Lectures and exercises will address the following issues: Economy - environment interactions, sustainable development, optimal management of renewable and non-renewable resources, pollution targets and pollution control, environmental policy instruments, international environmental agreements. The course heavily draws on the environmental management challenges in the Kyrgyz Republic, namely water, energy and pasture management.
Course objective: Candidates should be able to apply economic theory to analyze environmental and natural resource management issues. These issues include: economy - environment interactions, sustainable development, optimal management of renewable and non-renewable resources, pollution targets and pollution control, environmental policy instruments, and international environmental agreements.
The course designed to develop a deep understanding of economic processes. During the course, we will shed a light on the nature of economic processes in a short, medium and in a long-run perspective. We will also study the structure of economic models that describe economic processes under various combinations of parameters, as well as the reaction of the economy to changes in external and internal conditions. This course intended to lay the foundation for a better understanding of more advanced macroeconomic concepts.
This is an advanced Macroeconomics course designed to equip students with knowledge of macroeconomic policy and theory using both theory and empirical findings. In this course, we will be concerned with the following; developing positive models in order to understand the dynamics of key macroeconomic variables such as output, employment, unemployment, inflation, interest rates, etc.; and deriving normative prescriptions for macroeconomic policymaking, in particular regarding the proper setting of fiscal and monetary policies.
Main text(s): Romer, David (2012). Advanced Macroeconomics
The course textbook will be supplemented by relevant journal articles.
The course explores the potential of multiple-methods to provide valuable insights regarding Socio-Ecological-Technical Systems (SETS). It starts with an introduction on general concepts, empirical methodologies and methods applied in social sciences and economics aiming to study the complexity of human behaviour and the complex interactions within SETS.
The module draws on experimental economics and game theory to provide insights on the role of institutions and of behavioural aspects in solving problems of group externalities or social dilemmas, where the individual optimum clashes with the group optimum. Different types of games combined with the qualitative case studies are discussed, alongside, game design concepts and interpretation of empirical results.
During the final section of the course, AUCA students will help to organize an experiment supervised by instructors.