LIST OF POSSIBLE QUESTIONS FOR THE WRITTEN EXAM

TOPIC 1 – THE MAIN QUESTIONS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY

1. The Environmental Crisis: Limits to Growth and Climate Change.

Notes

2. Globalization: Description, causes, and consequences.

Mix the following text with notes

What Is Globalization?

Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments
of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information
technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic
development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world.

Globalization is not new, though. For thousands of years, people—and, later, corporations—have been
buying from and selling to each other in lands at great distances, such as through the famed Silk Road
across Central Asia that connected China and Europe during the Middle Ages. Likewise, for centuries,
people and corporations have invested in enterprises in other countries. In fact, many of the features of
the current wave of globalization are similar to those prevailing before the outbreak of the First World
War in 1914.

But policy and technological developments of the past few decades have spurred increases in cross-
border trade, investment, and migration so large that many observers believe the world has entered a
qualitatively new phase in its economic development. Since 1950, for example, the volume of world trade
has increased by 20 times, and from just 1997 to 1999 flows of foreign investment nearly doubled, from
$468 billion to $827 billion. Distinguishing this current wave of globalization from earlier ones, author
Thomas Friedman has said that today globalization is “farther, faster, cheaper, and deeper.”

This current wave of globalization has been driven by policies that have opened economies domestically
and internationally. In the years since the Second World War, and especially during the past two decades,
many governments have adopted free-market economic systems, vastly increasing their own productive
potential and creating myriad new opportunities for international trade and investment. Governments
also have negotiated dramatic reductions in barriers to commerce and have established international
agreements to promote trade in goods, services, and investment. Taking advantage of new opportunities
in foreign markets, corporations have built foreign factories and established production and marketing
arrangements with foreign partners. A defining feature of globalization, therefore, is an international
industrial and financial business structure.

Technology has been the other principal driver of globalization. Advances in information technology, in
particular, have dramatically transformed economic life. Information technologies have given all sorts of
individual economic actors—consumers, investors, businesses—valuable new tools for identifying and
pursuing economic opportunities, including faster and more informed analyses of economic trends
around the world, easy transfers of assets, and collaboration with far-flung partners.

Globalization is deeply controversial, however. Proponents of globalization argue that it allows poor
countries and their citizens to develop economically and raise their standards of living, while opponents
of globalization claim that the creation of an unfettered international free market has benefited
multinational corporations in the Western world at the expense of local enterprises, local cultures, and
common people. Resistance to globalization has therefore taken shape both at a popular and at a
governmental level as people and governments try to manage the flow of capital, labor, goods, and ideas
that constitute the current wave of globalization.

To find the right balance between benefits and costs associated with globalization, citizens of all nations
need to understand how globalization works and the policy choices facing them and their societies.
Globalization101.org tries to provide an accurate analysis of the issues and controversies regarding
globalization, without the slogans or ideological biases generally found in discussions of the topics. We
welcome you to our website.

TOPIC 2 – NEOLITHIC AGE AND ANCIENT EMPIRES

1. The Neolithic Age.

Notes

2. The Ancient Empires.

Mix the 2 readings of the topic into this point

TOPIC 3 – THE MIDDLE AGES

1. The Middle Ages: Agriculture, trade, industry, and economic ideas.

The Middle Ages is the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 B.C. and the fall of
the Eastern Roman Empire (or Byzantine Empire) in 1492 B.C. It is divided into 3 sections: Early Middle
Ages (476-1000), High Middle Ages (1000-1300) and Late Middle Ages (1000- 15th Century).

Feudal period started originating with the collapse of Charlemagne's empire in the late 9th century and
started declining after the Black Plague and the Peasant Revolt in the fourteenth century.. Medieval
economies were largely based around the operations of those landed estates, called feuds. Those landed
states were cultivated with a combination of free and unfree labor. In the early 9th century CE.
Charlemagne established counties and appointed Counts to rule regions of his domain. But, after his
death, his empire dissolved. Counts who had received lands from Charlemagne began to consolidate their
own local power, exerting control over the people who lived on their lands, creating hundreds of
kingdoms, each with its own manor o landed state, each one with its manorial court. They owed loyalty
to Church and kingdoms that guaranteed their claims of land ownership, but each medieval lord
established its own particular set of rules.

 Agriculture: NOTES
 Trade: It would be a misrepresentation of medieval life to conclude that cash and cash
transactions and the bargaining of a market society were wholly foreign to it. Rather, as was the
case with antiquity, we must think of medieval economic society as consisting of a huge, static,
largely moneyless foundation of agricultural production atop which flourished a considerable
variety of more dynamic activities.
For one thing, in addition to manors, there also existed the shrunken descendants of Roman
towns, and these small cities obviously required a network of markets to serve them. Every town
had its stalls to which peasants brought some portion of their crop for sale. More important,
towns were clearly a different social unit from manors, and the laws and customs of the manors
did not apply to their problems. Even when towns fell under manorial protection, townspeople
little by little won for themselves freedom from feudal obligations of labor and, more important,
from feudal obligations of law. In contrast to the “ancient customs” of the manor, a new,
evolving “law of merchants” regulated much of the commercial activity within the town walls.
 Another locus of active economic life was the fair. The fair was a kind of traveling market,
established in fixed localities for fixed dates, in which merchants from all over Europe conducted
a genuine international exchange. Held usually by once a year, the great fairs were tremendous
occasions, a mixture of social holiday, religious festival, and intense economic activity. At some
fairs, like those at Champagne in France or Stourbridge in England, a wide variety of merchandise
was brought for sale: silks from the Levant, books and parchments, horses, drugs, and spices.
Anyone who has ever been to the Flea Market, the famous open-air bazaar outside Paris, for
example, has savored something of the atmosphere of such a market.
 Industry: Guilds – funtions of the guild READING

 Economic Ideas: the just price – the disrepute of gain READING

2. The crisis of the Late Middle Ages.

Point 6 of the Study guide -> READING

TOPIC 4 – THE RISE OF EUROPE

1. The Atlantic Trade.

2. The Protestant Reformation and its influence on economic life.

3. The economic ideas of Adam Smith.

TOPIC 5 – THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

1. The Industrial Revolution: Technological changes, working conditions, and why it started in England.

NOTES + Reading

2. Socialist traditions: Utopian Socialism and Anarchism.

3. Socialist traditions: Marxism and Social Democracy before 1914.

TOPIC 6 – THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

1. The spread of industrialization and the Second Industrial Revolution.

2. The rise of big business in America.

TOPIC 7 – WAR, COLLECTIVISM AND ECONOMIC DEPRESSION

1. Causes and consequences of World War I.

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2. The Russian Revolution, Lenin’s conception of Marxism and the split between Communism and

Social Democracy.

3. The Great Depression and the New Deal.

TOPIC 8 – THE GOLDEN AGE

1. Keynesianism, the new economic institutions, and the Welfare State.

TOPIC 9 – THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

1. Neoliberalism: Ideas and economic policies.

2. The end of communism.