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CEE

Third World Debt

By Kenneth Rogoff

  [Editor's note: this article was written in 1991.]   By the end of 1990 the world's poor and developing countries owed more than $1.3 trillion to industrialized countries. Among the largest problem debtors were Brazil ($116 billion), Mexico ($97 billion), and Argentina ($61 billion). Of the total devel...

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Government Policy

Business Cycles

By Christina D. Romer

The United States and all other modern industrial economies experience significant swings in economic activity. In some years, most industries are booming and unemployment is low; in other years, most industries are operating well below capacity and unemployment is high. Periods of economic prosperity are typically cal...

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Economic Regulation

Health Care

By Michael A. Morrisey

Is Health Care Different? Health care is different from other goods and services: the health care product is ill-defined, the outcome of care is uncertain, large segments of the industry are dominated by nonprofit providers, and payments are made by third parties such as the government and private insurers. Many o...

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Economic Regulation

Antitrust

By Fred McChesney

Origins Before 1890, the only “antitrust” law was the common law. Contracts that allegedly restrained trade (e.g., price-fixing agreements) often were not legally enforceable, but they did not subject the parties to any legal sanctions, either. Nor were monopolies illegal. Economists generally believe that mon...

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Biographies

Jacob Viner

1892-1970

Economics historian Mark Blaug called Jacob Viner “the greatest historian of economic thought that ever lived.” One of Viner’s greatest accomplishments is his book Studies in the Theory of International Trade. This work is not just a history of the theory of international trade but also a guidebook that tells whe...

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Biographies

John Maynard Keynes

1883-1946

  So influential was John Maynard Keynes in the middle third of the twentieth century that an entire school of modern thought bears his name. Many of his ideas were revolutionary; almost all were controversial. Keynesian economics serves as a sort of yardstick that can define virtually all economists ...

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Biographies

Paul M. Romer

1955-

In 2018, U.S. economist Paul M. Romer was co-recipient, along with William D. Nordhaus, of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for “integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis.” Romer developed “endogenous growth theory.” Before his work in the 1980s and early 1990s, the domina...

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GUIDES

High School Economics Topics

Introduction The Council for Economic Education (CEE) has compiled a list of the 51 key economics concepts common to all U.S. State requirements for high school classes in economics. The resources arranged here supplement these recommended CEE topics. These free resources are appropriate for teachers of high school...

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Ten Key Ideas: Opening the Door to the Economic Way of Thinking

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