This subject seeks to provide a policy officer’s or public sector manager’s guide to basic economic principles and their application to public sector activities.  To achieve this, the subject will:

• Emphasize the nature of decision making by individuals, firms and governments and their effect on the allocation of resources.  The idea of the efficiency of resource allocation will be emphasised and developed.  This will be achieved by providing concrete examples and applications.
• Ensure participants understand the nature and role of markets. This is done by providing an overview of basic economic principles. This will take the form of introduction to the basic language, methods, concepts and frameworks that underpin economic reasoning and logic. This will mostly cover supply and demand of markets (microeconomics), though we will also touch on measurement, growth and operation of the aggregate economy (macroeconomics).
• Ensure participants understand the economic role of government. This will be achieved by providing a framework for understanding both the strengths and limits of markets as a form of social organization and for identifying the precise nature of market failure, the objectives of public policy and the form of intervention including via regulation, service provision, and redistribution.
• Understand the nature of the economic way of thinking, through developing frameworks for determining the relative roles of market and state. This will be done by way of providing particular economic problems as illustrations and by conveying the nature of the tool-kit that the economic profession brings to examination of issues, both economic and beyond economics.