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Areas of study in economics
One of the uses of economics is to understand how economies work and what the relations are between the main economic players and institutions.

An economy is usually analyzed in either of two ways.

Microeconomics examines the economic behavior of individual units (including businesses and households) and their interactions through individual markets, given scarcity and government regulation.[2] Within microeconomics, general equilibrium theory aggregates across all markets, including their movements and interactions toward equilibrium.
Macroeconomics examines an economy as a whole "top down" with a view to understanding interactions between the broadest aggregates such as national income and output, employment and inflation and broad aggregates like total consumption and investment spending and their components.[3]
Macroeconomics since at least the 1960s has been characterized by further micro-based modelling as to rationality of players and efficient use of market information. Today a consensus view is that good macroeconomics has solid microeconomic motivation as to theory and evidence.

The vast majority of economic theory is in terms of either macro or micro economics. However, a few authors (for example, Kurt Dopfer, Stuart Holland and Markos Mamalakis[4]) also argue that 'mesoeconomics', which considers the intermediate level of economic organization such as markets and other institutional arrangements, should be considered an additional branch of economic study.[5] Mamalakis claims that mesoeconomics "unifies and reconciles the macro and micro approaches"[6] and is a "richer" way of studying the dynamics of economics than the two traditional models. In a book published in 1996, Mamalakis claimed that in Latin America the mesoeconomic approach is the key to understanding the poverty and inequality that has persisted over two centuries despite the adoption of various different economic systems.[7] George Ainslie has proposed a theory of an individual as a collection of actors, based on experiments in consumer psychology. Picoeconomic thinking argues that behavioral economics provides evidence an even greater level of disaggregation that reduces the individual consumer's behavior to the psychological components that drive that behavior.

Techniques of economics
Specialized techniques may be used in the subject, including mathematical economics for representing the theory with simplicity, generality, and precision. A key technique is econometrics, which applies statistical methods to analyze economic data for the purpose of drawing fact-based generalizations and testing theories as to acceptance, rejection, or refinement.[8] Computational economics may use econometric models for forecasting or projecting on the basis of alternative policy assumptions.

Another division of the subject distinguishes positive economics, which seeks to predict and explain economic phenomena, from normative economics, which orders choices and actions by some criterion; such orderings necessarily involve value judgments.

Another trend which is more recent, and closer to microeconomics, is to use social psychology concepts (behavioral economics) and methods (experimental economics) to understand deviations from the predictions of neoclassical economics. Evolutionary economics often deals with the otherwise difficult questions related to the role of 'routines' and 'capabilities' in explaining heterogeneity in firm outcomes. Economic history is the study of economic change, and of economic phenomena in the past.

Financial economics has traditionally been considered a part of economics, as its body of results emerges naturally from microeconomics. However, today Finance effectively established itself as a separate, though closely related, discipline.

Economics can also be divided into numerous sub disciplines including: international economics, development economics, labor economics, environmental economics, industrial organization, public finance, economic psychology, economic sociology, institutional economics and economic geography. The JEL classification codes provide a comprehensive, detailed way of classifying and searching for economics articles by subject matter. An alternative classification of often detailed entries by mutually-exclusive categories and subcategories is The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics (1987).

2007-03-07 20:03:16 · answer #1 · answered by ♥!BabyDoLL!♥ 5 · 0 0

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