Introduction
Macroeconomics is worried about the economy as a whole, such as output and growth that measures the total income of the economy in goods and services and inflation which the percentage increases yearly in the price of goods and services. Employment is also included which is all about the changes in the labour market. The objective of the UK’s government is to achieve stability of growth and employment. This is for the UK to build a strong economic future. The government aims to raise the rates of encouraging growth and achieve rising success by creating economic opportunities for the public.
1.1 Explain the purpose of a selection of indicators of national economic behaviour which are Economic growth, Unemployment, Inflation and Balance of Payment.
Economic growth
Economic growth is the most basic indicator of an economy's health which is the rate at which national income is growing. Economic growth is a rise in what an economy can produce if it is using all its scarce resources. A combination of two goods that can be produced in a country when the available resources are fully and efficiently utilized is called production possibility frontier (PPF). An increase in an economy’s productive potential can be shown by an outward shift in the economy’s PPF. The easiest way to show economic growth is to combine all goods into consumer and capital goods. A shift to the right of a PPF means that an economy has raised its volume to produce.
PPF
Unemployment
Unemployment is a big problem in this society, because it constitutes the waste of resources. There is a possible chance that it leads to poverty for those who are out of work. High unemployment is a pointer of bad national economic performance, vice versa...
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...A current account deficit can be the reason of an industry, or a whole sector of the economy, that goes into refusal. Over the last 30 years the UK economy has reindustrialized. Man made goods that were formerly created domestically are now imported from abroad. The rise in the quantity of man made goods imported has hard-pressed the UK’s current account towards deficit.
External shocks
An external shock that is past a country’s control can have deep collision on that country’s current account. For example, the UK is now a net importer of oil because North Sea oil raw materials are fading. The demand for oil is price inelastic because it has little alternatives. If the supply of oil from the Middle East is interrupted then even a moderately little adjustment in the oil price would roughly definitely move forward the UK’s Current Account further into deficit.
The U.S. trade deficit has risen more or less steadily since 1992. In the second quarter of 2004, the trade deficit relative to GDP surpassed the 5 percent mark for the first time. Many economists already considered trade deficits above 4 percent of GDP dangerously high. The fear is that continued growth in this external imbalance of the U.S. economy will ultimately spook overseas investors. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/09/b193700.html
The Economy is the backbone to society. There are many factors that operate in, and govern our society’s economical structure. Factors such as scarcity and choice, opportunity cost, marginal analysis, microeconomics, macroeconomics, factors of production, production possibilities, law of increasing opportunity cost, economic systems, circular flow model, money, and economic costs and profits all contribute to what is known as the economy. These properties as well as a few others, work together to influence the economy. Microeconomics and Macroeconomics are two major components. Both of these are broken down into several different components that dictate societal norms and views.
However, due to the fact that GDP is measured in either current or nominal prices, we cannot differentiate two length of time without adjusting for inflation. In order to calculate the real Gross Domestic Product, the nominal GDP level have to be changed accordingly to the changes in price of goods and services so that we will be able to determine on whether the total output of goods and services produced has increased because a higher number of output is produced or is it because of the increase in price only. A GDP deflator is used to adjust the GDP from nominal to constant prices. GDP have an important and significant role in the economy. One of the reason why GDP is important is GDP provides us information about the size and performance of an economy in the country. The growth rate of real GDP is frequently used to indicate the well-being of an economy. If the value of the real GDP is increasing at a rapid rate, companies and organization will most likely hire more employees for their production process and this will increase the employment rate in a country. When the value of GDP decreases, unemployment rate usually increases. However, all of these are subject to the situation in a country. For example, the value of GDP increases in a period of time but it does not increase at a rapid enough rate
Moreover, the faster the economy grew, the more it needed imports. But exports could not keep up with imports, and so the country ran out of foreign currency as a consequence of this deficit on the balance of payments. The government restricted imports to essentials and raised interest rates to bring money into the country. The result was usually a deep recession. Companies under pressure cut wages and laid off workers.
People need money to purchase all kinds of goods and services they needed every day and sometimes, for goods or services they desire to own. To fulfill that, they have the essential need to earn money. In order to earn money, they must work in either in fields related to their interests or to their qualifications. However, people will meet different challenges during their jobs-hunting sessions, such as many candidates competing for a job vacancy; salaries offered are lower than expected salaries and economic crisis or down which causes unemployment. Unemployment is what we will be looking into in this report. Dwidedi (2010) stated that unemployment is defined as not much job vacancies are available to fulfill the amount of people who want to work and can work according to the current pay they can get for a job they chose to work as. There are four major types of unemployment: frictional, structural, cyclical and seasonal unemployment.
Macroeconomics is the study of the economy as a whole, which looks at economic growth, unemployment and inflation. (Dobson and Palfreman, 1999) Government macroeconomics objectives can dividend into
Difficulties in Formulating Macroeconomic Policy Policy makers try to influence the behaviour of broad economic aggregates in order to improve the performance of the economy. The main macroeconomic objectives of policy are: a high and relatively stable level of employment; a stable general price level; a growing level of real income (economic growth); balance of payments equilibrium, and certain distributional aims. This essay will go through what these difficulties are and examine how these difficulties affect the policy maker when they attempt to formulate macroeconomic policy. It is difficult to provide a single decisive factor for policy evaluation as a change in political and/or economic circumstances may result in declared objectives being changed or reversed. Economists can give advice on the feasibility and desirability of policies designed to attain the ultimate targets, however, the ultimate responsibility lies with the policy maker.
This study investigates the short-term relationship between the UK stock market index (FTSE 100) and six macroeconomic variables during the period 2000-2013 using a multivariate vector autoregression and Granger causality tests. Variance decomposition and impulse response functions are used to measure the shocks of a variable from the other variables and the Granger causality test is used to investigate the lead-lag relationships among these variables.
=== A study of economics in terms of whole systems especially with reference to general levels of output and income and to the interrelations among sectors of the economy is called macroeconomics. Macroeconomics is concerned with the behavior of the economy as a whole—with booms and recessions, the economy’s total output of goods and services and the growth of output, the rates of inflation and unemployment, the balance of payments, and exchange rates. Macroeconomics deals with the increase in output and employment over long period of time—that is economic growth—and with the short-run fluctuations that constitutes the business cycle. Macroeconomics focuses on the economic behavior and policies that effect consumption and investment, trade balance, the determinants of changes in wages and prices, monetary and fiscal policies, the money stock, the federal budget, interest rates, and national debt. In brief, macroeconomics deals with the major economic issues and problems of the day.
Inflation and unemployment are two key elements when evaluating a whole economy and it is also easy to get those figures from National Bureau of Statistics when you want to evaluate it. However, the relationship between them is a controversial topic, which has been debated by economists for decades. From some famous economists such as Paul Samuelson, Milton Freidman etc to some infamous economists, this topic received a lot of attention. However, it is this debate that makes the thinking about it evolve. In this essay, the controversial topic will be discussed by viewing different economists’ opinions on that according to time sequencing. But before started, it is worthy getting a better understanding of the terms, inflation and unemployment.
Macroeconomics presents the educational function to help students become the future economics specialist, forming a critical thinking about the complex functioning of the contemporary economy. Thus, the field of study of Macroeconomics has evolved over time, through a long process of confrontation of various theories of thinking and economic application. Moreover, Macroeconomia investigates the economy at a national level as a whole, targeting the aggregation of individual economic behaviors across the economy as well as the resulting global effects: unemployment, inflation, cyclical development, imbalance in external economic exchanges, external economic relations.
Unemployment issue can lead to a lot of impacts to the economic growth. Higher unemployment rate will lead to increase government borrowing. When people are without their job, they would paid less in the income tax. So, it will cause a drop in tax revenue because there are lesser people paying income tax and spending less. Due to the loss of earnings to the unemployed, the government need to spend more subsidy for them in housing benefits and income support.
In 1996, the US current account and emerging market plus developing country current account were each about zero. In 2008, US current account was in deficit by $ 600 bn, the emerging market/developing country current account in surplus by $ 900 bn. (sect. 1.1)
Its aim is to stabilise the national economy to minimise fluctuations in growth and prices by formulating policies.
The macroeconomic environment is a dynamic environment, which could not remain unchanged (Gajewsky 2015). There are many factors influence the global macroeconomic environment, such as interest rate, exchange rate, GDP，aggregate demand, monetary policy and other macroeconomic variable (Oxelheim and Wihlborg 2008). These factors are closely associated with commodity price.