Board and qualification: Edexcel IGCSE
In Year 10 students will start by learning about basic economic problems. All resources are scarce and therefore limited in supply. Consumers, firms and governments all have to make choices between different products and these choices will introduce students to the concept of opportunity cost. Microeconomics is the study of individual markets. We will learn about the supply and demand model, which will give students a toolkit to explore how changes in the economy will affect supply, demand, price and quantity. The model will help to explain why prices rise and fall, for example enabling students to explain the changes in oil, house, gold and cocoa prices. We will look at how much the quantity supplied and demanded will respond to changes in price or income, which will help students to understand why some price changes see large or small changes in quantity. Having looked at how markets work, we will look at how they sometimes fail. In some cases we overconsume as we ignore negative impacts on others, for example pollution. In other cases we underconsume as we might undervalue the benefits our education could bring to others. We will then move on to studying business economics. We will look at what is needed to produce goods and services, including labour, capital and enterprise. We will look at how businesses can organise production to improve the output per worker, which we call productivity. We will study business costs, revenues and profits. We will then explore different types of businesses, from those that are competitive to single firms that we call monopolies, and also those industries with several large firms, which we call oligopolies. In each case we will consider the advantages of the types of business that exist. Sometimes markets and businesses do not give the best outcome for people and so governments have to enter the market. Students will look at the alternative ways in which they can affect markets, considering the benefits and drawbacks of each.
In Year 11 in macroeconomics we will look at all the markets combined in a country. We will then look at students own countries’ and other countries’ economies. We will look at the different objectives that governments will be concerned about. These include trying to achieve:
- low inflation
- low unemployment
- increases in economic growth
- surpluses or equilibrium on the current account of the balance of payments
- redistribution of income
- environmental protection
For each objective, we will look at the issues and problems involved and how the government acts to improve the outcomes. We will then look at the global economy. This will involve looking at the benefits and problems of increased integration between economies of the globe. We will look at international trade and how countries come together as trading partners to boost growth. Exchange rates will also be looked at to consider how changes can affect an economy. We will study both developing and developed economies.
