General chemistry and organic chemistry (university or senior year high school)

The Economics 1 course will start with a presentation of the demand and supply economic model in order to provide an analysis of the mechanisms and inner workings of competitive markets (price determination, equilibrium quantity, etc.). It will also be the occasion to investigate the impact on the competitive equilibrium of some public policies such as price control and indirect taxation. The course will then determine why, and under which conditions, free trade can be viewed as an efficient way to coordinate the actions of specialized economic agents. Through a careful examination of the (utopic) necessary conditions a market must fulfil so as to be considered perfectly competitive, it will be brought to the students' attention that those conditions are seldom (if ever) respected: the course will then provide an overview of several market failures, as well as study in detail several types of imperfect competition. Finally, the question of the possibility (and the necessity) of public intervention in a market economy will remain a central focus throughout the course. Part I: Introduction Chapter 1: "To think like an economist" - basic concepts (Mankiw, chapitres 1 et 2) Part II: Supply and demand - how markets work Chapter 3: The market forces of supply and demand (Mankiw, ch. 4, ch. 5) Chapter 4: Consumers, producers and the efficiency of markets (Mankiw, ch. 7, 8) Chapter 5: Supply, demand and government policies (Mankiw, ch. 6) Part III: Market failures under perfect competition Chapter 6: Externalities (Mankiw, ch.10) Chapter 7: Public goods and common resources (Mankiw ch. 11) Part IV: Firm behavior in competitive markets Chapter 8: The costs of production (Mankiw, ch. 13) Chapter 9: Firms in competitive markets (Mankiw, ch. 14) Part V: Imperfect competition Chapter 10: The monopoly and other examples of imperfect compeition (Mankiw ch. 10, 11)