Principles of Macroeconomics

Principles of Macroeconomics is focused on the material that students need to cover in a first introductory course. It is slightly more compact than the majority of introductory macroeconomics books in the Canadian marketplace. Decades of teaching experience and textbook writing has led the authors to avoid the encyclopedic approach that characterizes the recent trends in textbooks. Consistent with this approach, there are no appendices or 'afterthought' chapters. If important material is challenging then it is still included in the main body of the text; it is not relegated elsewhere for a limited audience; the text makes choices on what issues and topics are important in an introductory course. This philosophy has resulted in a Macro book of just 13 chapters, with three introductory chapters common to both our Principles of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics books.Examples are domestic and international in their subject matter and are of the modern era - financial markets, monetary and fiscal policies aimed at inflation and debt control, globalization and the importance of trade flows in economic structure and concerns about slow growth and the risk of deflation are included. The title is intended to be informative. Students are introduced to the concepts of models early, and the working of such models is illustrated in every chapter. While this book avoids calculus and uses algebra sparingly, it still aims to be rigorous. In contrast to many books on the market that simply insert diagrams and discuss concepts in a diagrammatic framework, our books develop and analyze key concepts and relations by introducing numerical and empirical examples at the outset. Students are introduced immediately to the practice of taking a set of data, examining it numerically, plotting it and thinking about how it illustrates a concept or relationship. The process is not difficult but it is rigorous and stresses the link between empirical observation, economic theory, models and policy. Hence numerical examples, diagrams, and straight line equations and are introduced early and are used throughout.