By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain and analyze various arguments that are in support of restricting imports, including the infant industry argument, the anti-dumping argument, the environmental protection argument, the unsafe consumer products argument, and the national interest argument
Explain dumping and race to the bottom
Evaluate the significance of countries’ perceptions on the benefits of growing trade

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain the origin and role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
Discuss the significance and provide examples of regional trading agreements
Analyze trade policy at the national level
Evaluate long-term trends in barriers to trade

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Discuss how international trade influences the job market
Analyze the opportunity cost of protectionism
Explain how international trade impacts wages, labor standards, and working conditions

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain protectionism and its three main forms
Analyze protectionism through concepts of demand and supply, noting its effects on equilibrium
Calculate the effects of trade barriers

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Asses the complexity of international trade
Discuss why a market-oriented economy is so affected by international trade
Explain disruptive market change

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Describe how the federal government can use discretionary fiscal policy to stabilize the economy
Identify examples of automatic stabilizers
Understand how a government can use standardized employment budget to identify automatic stabilizers

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain the U.S. federal budget in terms of annual debt and accumulated debt
Understand how economic growth or decline can influence a budget surplus or budget deficit

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify U.S. budget deficit and surplus trends over the past five decades
Explain the differences between the U.S. federal budget, and state and local budgets

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Understand how fiscal policy and monetary policy are interconnected
Explain the three lag times that often occur when solving economic problems
Identify the legal and political challenges of responding to an economic problem

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Differentiate among a regressive tax, a proportional tax, and a progressive tax
Identify major revenue sources for the U.S. federal budget

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Understand the arguments for and against requiring the U.S. federal budget to be balanced
Consider the long-run and short-run effects of a federal budget deficit

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain how expansionary fiscal policy can shift aggregate demand and influence the economy
Explain how contractionary fiscal policy can shift aggregate demand and influence the economy

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify patterns of inflation for the United States using data from the Consumer Price Index
Identify patterns of inflation on an international level

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Use the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to calculate U.S. inflation rates
Identify several ways the Bureau of Labor Statistics avoids biases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI)
Differentiate among the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Producer Price Index (PPI), the International Price Index, the Employment Cost Index, and the GDP deflator.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain the relationship between indexing and inflation
Identify three ways the government can control inflation through macroeconomic policy

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain how inflation can cause redistributions of purchasing power
Identify ways inflation can blur the perception of supply and demand
Explain the economic benefits and challenges of inflation

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Calculate the annual rate of inflation
Explain and use index numbers and base years when simplifying the total quantity spent over a year for products
Calculate inflation rates using index numbers