Week X: Micro, Meso, Macro

Levels of analysis in economics

Micro, meso, macro

Micro: choices of individual units (internal stakeholders, mainly, consumers and producers)

Macro: behaviours of aggregates (income, unemployment, inflation)

Meso (sectoral): An intermediate level of aggregation, grouping firms within the same industrial sector

On methodological individualism

  • In economics reducing ll societal phenomena to this had proved either too difficult or simply misleading. Models of the national economy based on individual sessions are consistently worse than purely aggregate analyses

Economic Growth and Development

The growth patterns of economic powerhouses suggest that within the richer countries in the world, there is a negative relationship between former GDP and future growth. Essentially the poorer countries become the ones to show exponential amounts of growth. However it is not a globally applicable phenomenon.

Economic Growth

  • Rate of change of aggregate income

    • no structural change: the contribution of sectoral income to aggregate income is assumed to be constant

Economic Development

  • Income increases, but with different sectors growing at different rates

    • In other words, non-proportional growth

    • structural change

    • Economic improvement can be motivated but specific sectoral investment

Can we explain macro phenomena based on micro behaviour?

The problem of methodological individualism

Is a macro approach always sufficient to understand macro phenomena?

What new insights the meso level can provide