Macroeconomics

Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study aggregate measures of the economy, such as output or gross domestic product (GDP), national income, unemployment, inflation, consumption, saving, investment, or trade. Macroeconomics is primarily focused on questions that help to understand aggregate variables in relation to long-run economic growth. Macroeconomics and microeconomics are the two most general fields in economics. Given macroeconomists focus on large-scale phenomena, or aggregate variables, they differ significantly from microeconomists who study markets and decision making at a smaller level of analysis, such as firms or consumers. This divide is institutionalized in the field of economics, given the differences in both methods and outcomes of interest. Macroeconomics is further divided into topics based on the time frame of analysis: short-term fluctuations over the business cycle, medium-term determinants of aggregate variables, such as unemployment, that are unaffected by short-term shocks, and long-term economic growth. The field also includes analysis of monetary and fiscal policies, particularly where they target stabilization of certain indicators or the rate of economic growth. Macroeconomics, as a separate field of research and study, is generally recognized to have begun in 1936, when John Maynard Keynes published his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but its intellectual predecessors are much older. Swedish economist Knut Wicksell wrote the book Interest and Prices (1898), translated into English in 1936, is considered to be the pioneer of macroeconomics, while Keynes who introduced national income accounting and various related concepts can be said to be the founding father of macroeconomics as a formal discipline. Since World War II, various macroeconomic schools of thought like Keynesians, monetarists, new classical and new Keynesian economists have made contributions...