EU TRADE AND INVESTMENT IN HISTORIC AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE

Step One: the size of the EU economy

Background of the Course

      • The course was tailored, in the first place, to meet the interest of a group of political science and economics university teachers from India and China;

      • The overall theme and subthemes were defined in an exchange during a training course on the EU (for which the Stepicipant were asked beforehand to outline their expectations) in December 2018, and in a similar but shorter deliberation in mid-2019 with professors and post-graduates from China; on both occasions there were follow-up consultations with Stepicipants, which also helped fine-tune its content;

      • Some of the trade and investment related themes of the course are likely to require updates in the near future;

      • The ultimate academic objective of the Course is to lay the foundations of a fully-fledged university program; with this intention, the Course includes a review of and navigation in the statistics, indexes for international comparison and sources relevant to the respective Unit themes.

      • The quiz questions included in the course are followed by Tutor comments. These tutor comment give only a common denominator-answers. The very nature of the themes of the course makes it possible to both have different interpretations of the statistics and encourage you to produce such interpretations. The “clues” suggested after the quizzes help navigating you in your efforts to provide as comprehensive answers as possible.

      • For sources on notions see sections “Key sources” after each sub-unit, and “Recommended Sources” at the end of the Course. “Key sources”, where often there are links to short and select movie lectures, lead students to basics of the discussed theme (many of them are also given in the units’ Glossaries), the “Recommended Source” help navigate to a deeper understanding of the themes and assist self-education.

Here the course gives an introduction to the place of the EU in the global economy.

Abbreviations used in the course