Hello. Welcome to this course on globalization and its effect on our business decisions, on our private decisions, on the life of citizens, how economic principles affect our lives in the international realm. Happy to have you here. I'd like to give a special welcome to those of you who were in my previous course which is understanding economic policy-making, where we explored different macroeconomic principles, and how they could be interpreted in our political and economic realities in our everyday life, how they affect business decisions. And for those of you who were in the course, now we're going to broaden move from the macroeconomy, the national economy into the international economy. For those of you who were not there, I welcome you as well. These are stand-alone courses, so you perfectly well can take this course without the previous one. Maybe after taking this course, you'll want to go back and just focus on the macroeconomy. The reason for giving this course is that globalization, and sort of the discontent with globalization, have been so prominent in the world's political debates recently, and concerns over globalization have actually informed a lot of voting decisions and selections of candidates or national changes/referendums that really will alter the future of countries. And I think, there's a need for us to understand what globalization is and understand the economic principles that are relevant there. So, if we think about globalization, it basically has to do with free movements of people, of goods, of services, and of capital. And in this course, I've structured it into four sections that roughly correspond to those. We're going to look first at exchange rates. We're going to see what determines exchange rates and how different exchange rates affect the economy and then, look at the reality of currencies in different countries. We're then going to move on to trade, and I'm going to explore with you the basic model of free trade, its benefits for the economy, what happens when we interfere with free trade, and move towards protectionism. And then, we're going to look at the reality of free trade in the world, and see some of the institutions and organizations that have been created in order to promote free trade, and to explore the recent trends in trade and protectionism. In the third module, we're going to move on to the balance of payments which is a summary of all the economic transactions between one country and the rest of the world. And we going to to look at, first of all, just describing it, analyzing it, what do surpluses and deficits mean. And then from there, we're going to use the balance of payments to try to understand the growth model that different countries have adopted in the world, and the global growth model, and how we all fit together in this symbiotic relationship that some people may have never thought about, what it tells us about stability of the global financial system, stability of our objectives for growth on a national and on a global level. And then finally, we're going to move into the final module, which is probably the most hotly debated in today's political scene, which is immigration or migration as I'll refer to it more. And, we're going to think about, first of all, what migration looks like in the world. We're yet to look at some basic statistics and trends. And then, we're going to look at how migration affects the country that the migrants come from and the country that the migrants go to. And here, we're going explode a lot of the myths that we encounter in the political debate. And, we're going to learn what the true effects of migration are and how we can help it to be more beneficial for the economy and for the migrant. In the process of exploring these four sections in this course: exchange rates, trade, the balance of payments, and migration; there are a number of questions that we're going to look at, that we're going to answer. One of them is, isn't it better for every country just to produce its own goods and not have to worry about other countries? Isn't it better for all of us to be self-sufficient? And sometimes we think that that is the case, right? Wouldn't that keep employment high? So, we'll look at that question. Another question we're going to look at is, if countries are trading as we are in the world, isn't there always a winner and a loser? Now, couldn't it be that I'm losing out from trade and somebody else is gaining? Another question we're going to ask ourselves is, don't immigrants take away jobs from locals? Isn't it a reality that when we allow migrants into the economy that we sacrifice employment? And then, another question we're going to ask ourselves is, would it be better for all of us just to, kind of, move into our shells to regain national sovereignty, to regain control of our economies, and leave globalization or is there something important to be gained from globalization? So, those are some of the questions that we'll explore. There are others but I hope that you will enter deeply into this debate because it is so relevant to our world today, and I hope you're going to find some answers here as we move through this course.
