Economics, B.Sc.

Governance is obligatory for all students as an area of application for all students. Here, the structural failure of markets and the resulting necessity of state intervention in central areas such as the labour market, the education sector and social policy are addressed. The typical opportunities and risks that result from a federal state structure for the welfare of society as a whole are also the subject of the courses. The module Behavioural and Industrial Economics explicitly addresses the limits of economic modelling that is based on individuals acting with unlimited rationality and ignores the game-theoretical background of entrepreneurial action.

The financial markets area of application is not only recommended for students who have a future career in the banking and insurance sector in mind and who are particularly interested in financial market products and risk management. The inherent risks of uncontrolled capital markets and the need to regulate them at international level are also addressed in detail. Only by knowing the performance of capital markets on the one hand and the limits of this performance on the other hand can sensitivity to emerging financial market crises be achieved. In this area of application, too, the mathematical foundations laid in the first two semesters are used in several subjects. The business cycle forecast is rather unknown in conventional courses of study as part of the module Business cycle and growth theory. Surely every economist must know where economic growth comes from without neither increasing prosperity nor opening up further redistribution latitudes. In an application-oriented study programme, however, it seems superfluous to try to mathematically derive long-term growth trends spanning several decades in a variety of models. Rather, practice dominates the question of where the economy will move over the next five or ten years. For this prognosis, students are given various calculation methods in case-study-related classes.

The area of globalisation is not entirely independent of the scope of financial markets. Here, knowledge of monetary and real foreign trade theory and its political application is imparted. The student develops a feeling for the interdependence of political and economic action in view of the increasingly intertwined sales markets. In addition, this area aims to draw attention to the global prosperity gap between northern and southern countries and to sharpen the sense of responsibility for poverty reduction. What can contemporary development policy look like? What role do multinational institutions such as the World Bank and the Monetary Fund play, and what tasks can non-governmental organisations assume?

It is hard to imagine a modern economic degree course without the application area environment. As in the other fields of application, an arc is drawn from the economic analysis of market failure in the environmental sector to the political design of the boundaries of entrepreneurial action. The fact that the limits are also set on political design becomes clear when one compares the international environmental impacts with the national decision-making authority of the states. Against the background of the energy system transformation, a deliberate focus was placed on national and European energy policy. In this context, the overall societal efficiency of various energy sources, capacity problems in networks and problems with the storage capacity of energy as well as the resulting challenges for policymakers are dealt with.

The healthcare sector has become one of the most important economic sectors in Germany. The increasing demand for medical services and wellness offers at the local level is often the driving force behind regional development. At the same time, however, demographic change and the expected further increase in demand will pose considerable financial problems for the health care system. In addition, in a common European market that guarantees the free movement of goods and services, national efforts to limit the demand for insurance-financed health services are often limited. The application focus on health addresses all these questions and attempts to show structural lines of development.