Economics Courses

Cost benefit analysis (CBA) lies at the heart of policy appraisal in Government and increasingly for the private and voluntary sector too. For CBA to be useful in informing resource allocation decisions, we need to accurately measure all the causal impacts of the policy and to attach a monetary value to them.

This course will introduce and explain the concepts and tools of economics. It will teach participants a number of economic principles, furnishing them with a set of tools to both enhance their analytical ability and to enable them to work more closely with economists. Applications and case-studies will be presented alongside the theory; participants will be encouraged to relate these to their own areas of work and that of their organisation as a whole. The approach will be discursive and participatory.

This course builds on the introductory Economics for non-economists course. The purpose of this course is to review and analyse current macroeconomic issues and events, from the perspective of the interactions between the private sector and government policymakers. We focus in particular on the keys to economic growth, the determinants of business cycles, the role of fiscal and monetary policies, and the causes and consequences of the Great Recession of 2008.

This two day course builds on the introductory Economics for non-economists course. Participants will revisit some familiar concepts and will gain more insight into the theory behind some key principles of economics and develop a broader understanding of how they directly influence government policy.

The course is voluntarily directed to non-experts. While it covers the theoretical definition of the main national accounts aggregates, it does it in a lively manner based on the concrete experience of the teacher.

This practical, two-day workshop will present an overview of the manipulations of data that are often required prior to statistical analysis. Topics will include dealing with outliers, combining data from different sources, calculating annual average growth rates, weighting and smoothing data and constructing indexes. It was also cover basic statistical methods used in describing data such as measures of central tendency and dispersion, correlation and the use of dummy variables in regression analysis.

This Wellbeing in Economics, Statistics and Social Research course is designed and delivered by academics, and public sector analysts, economics and statisticians at the 'coal-face' using wellbeing in government policy development.