Courses Description

Course outline

1. The public sector: size and ways of its measurement, evolution through time and qualitative changes
2. Pluralist theory, the classical economic school, and the economically neutral state
3. Neoclassical theory of the public sector, the ‘economic problem’ and main goals of modern societies
4. Free market, the price mechanism and social welfare
a. Public goods
b. Externalities
c. Missing markets.
d. Problems of information
e. Imperfect competition
f. Inability to achieve economic stabilization
g. Inability to achieve a ‘satisfactory’ income distribution
h. Inability to achieve a satisfactory rate of development/growth
5. Collective representation of individual preferences: Arrow’s ‘impossibility’ theorem
6. The State as economic agent: similarities and differences of market and political processes