Washngtn Business the World 1

2 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This is the first course of Washington, Business, and the World, a BGA two-course sequence with an extended format and varied collection of content. The lecture content provides an important economics-based foundation to build and reinforce your understanding of markets and prepare you to better appreciate and engage with complex issues at the nexus of business and global affairs. The overall sequence features guest speakers, DC event going, guest DC-based practitioners, Writing to Make Things Happen, and culminating experiential teamwork. The lecture sessions and readings for the first half of the course focus on various normative dimensions of the interplay between businesses and larger societal institutions, and the potential for and perils of markets as a mechanism to allocate society’s resources. Among the myriad critical questions to be addressed are the following: Are markets the “miracle” to push economic well-being forward or are they sowing the seeds of society’s demise? Under what conditions do markets work well, and under what conditions might they fail? When they fail, what mechanisms exist either within markets or externally to correct resource distortions? How do external control mechanisms such as governmental, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and institutions seek to correct market failures? What role do public and private interests play in motivating governmental and non-governmental actors? The second half pivots to a consideration of these same interrelationships but from a positive perspective: How well, in fact, do firms perform? Does their performance align with larger societal goals? What are the determinants of the success or failure of firms’ furtherance of societal goals? Conversely, how well do governmental bodies perform? What are the drivers of this performance? How important, in practice, are different economic, legal, and administrative conditions for the successful operation of governmental bodies? At a very high level, what influence do governmental bodies have over firm behavior, and what influence do firms have over governmental bodies?