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Economics for the Real World: Understanding Economic Data

Programme Features

• A skeleton key to common economic concepts
  • volume and value measures, nominal and real rates of change, weighted indices, seasonally adjusted indicators, trends and cycles, stocks and flows, current and capital expenditures
• How big's the nation’s cake?
  • measuring the national income: GDP versus GNP; income, output and expenditure measures; per capital income, real GDP, other ways of assessing relative economic prosperity, purchasing power parities
• Baking and cutting the cake
  • components of national income: government spending, private consumption, fixed investment, imports and exports; sectoral composition – services, industry, manufacturing and agriculture; distribution of income – wages, profits, rents, measures of income/wealth inequality
• Public finances
  • public expenditure – programme and outcome spending, spending by central government, local authorities and public corporations; taxation – principal types of revenue raising; budget balance, the National Debt
• Personal sector
  • disposable income, consumer spending, savings ratio, personal indebtedness, consumer confidence
• Corporate sector
  • profits, dividends, sectoral analysis – industrial & commercial companies, financial institutions, company formations and failures, business confidence
• Prices
  • retail prices – the various measures, EU’s Harmonised Price Index, producer prices, commodity prices, price deflators
• Labour market
  • employment, unemployment, vacancies, hours worked, wages & earnings, unit labour costs
• Foreign trade and payments
  • imports, exports, trade balances, terms of trade balance of payments – current & capital accounts, official reserves, external debts and assets
• Money and financial markets
  • interest rates, money supply – narrow & broad measures, exchange rates – nominal & effective, bond & equity markets – prices & yields

Why you should attend:

This course addresses the key economic principles that underpin business and government, bypassing the highly abstract and unrealistic components of much conventional economics training. It clarifies the issues and interprets the jargon in order to make economic theory relevant to business activity. The course aims to equip attendees with a practical understanding of the ways in which economists try to describe and explain the workings of the economy, the significance of the many types of economic data and how changes in them should be interpreted.

On completing the course, you will:

• understand key economic principles, activities and institutions
• interpret the relationship between economic theory and business activity
• be aware of key economic indicators, their application and limitations
• gain confidence in using economic data

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