Customer Reviews

Macroeconomics: A European Text

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First of all, the book does cover basic Macroeconomics. Not in a great way though, you could easily read through this book without really grasping what the IS-LM curves actually do for example, but if you realize when they are doing a poor job of explaining, just read again or read up elsewhere.
Also, if you have done Microeconomics, too much of this book is pure repetition. Too much of this book pretends a large part of the overlap between macro- and microeconomics is purely macroeconomics, so it explains it all. I guess that is a symptom of a sketchy subjectarea, Microeconomics is a far better defined area of study, Macro seems to be Micro, Finance and a lot of guesswork in the middle. An exaggeration for sure, and it COULD be through errors of this book that I got this impression, but I don't think so.

Maybe the worst thing though, is that they have done a spectacular job of managing to get just about every box (Sort of minicases the embellishes the text) and figures/tables on a different page than where it is referenced. This means you constantly have to flip the page as you read through the reasoning and at the same time try to follow it in the figures. It may sound trivial, but after a while I can assure you it is not. Mabe they should have printed this book in a larger format, getting some ideas from american textbooks where they usually allow for a little more space in order to match figures and text, instead of trying to save on papercost.

This book, intermediate in level, is a great textbook for european students or students interested in European economics. It's nice to read a european oriented book every now and then when most economics books are American. The book deals the with modern approach to macro economicsa and uses micro-economic foundations. It gives timely examples and lively case studies taken from the European and global economic scene. Even for business school students this book will be very usefull in understanding the european ecnomic envoronment. Moreover it's well written, easy to read style.

This book is hard to understand and not good for self study. On the back side of the book it is written that
"...companian web site provides the following resources for both lecturer and student:
* Lecture Plans
* PowerPoint slide shows
* Solutions to end of chapter exercises
* Revision Questions
* Weblinks
* Case studies."
I tried to access the website but i noticed that those resources are not for students although they mentioned so.
I donot recommend that book instead buy one of N. Gregory Mankiw's economics book.

Regards,