Microeconomics Case Study

Switzerland, Cuba and India: Addressing the Troika of Economic Problems in Three Economies

OR

Abstract:
The reality of unlimited wants and the limited resources to satisfy those wants stares all the economies of the world. Economies – whether capitalist, command or mixed – come face to face with triple basic economic issues of what to produce, how to produce and for whom to produce. Different economic systems like market economy, command economy and mixed economy have different ways of dealing with these problems. A market economy like Switzerland lets market forces come to play while a command economy like Cuba gets the controlling hand of government on all the aspects of the economy. In a mixed economy like India, both the government and the private enterprise pair up to set the economy to play. The case is an attempt to study the three types of economies and evaluate their performance in the touchstone of the above-cited central economic problems. Whether the Private enterprise by itself or the Government alone have the greatest potentiality to pull off success, or both are required to do the trick, would come trickling out as one goes through the gripping details of the case.

Pedagogical Objectives:

• To understand the three problems of economic system
• To analyse the features of a market economy and how it answers the three economic problems
• To understand how a command economy functions and the role of government in resolving the three economic problems
• To analyse the concept of mixed economy and its way of dealing with the three economic problems.

Keywords : Three Economic Problems – What, How and For Whom to Produce, Circular Flow of Economic Activity, Government and Business, The Role of Government in Business, GDP, Exports and Imports, Production Possibility Frontier, Production Possibility Curve, Trade Offs, Economic Goals, Managerial Economics, Microeconomics, Economics for Business, Business Economics, Economics for Managers, Paul Samuelson