The primary objective of this course is to improve students' ability to apply microeconomic reasoning to public issues, policies and programs. We will study the forces of supply and demand that determine prices and the allocation of resources in markets for goods and services, markets for labor, and markets for natural resources. The focus is on how and why markets work, why they may fail to work, and the policy implications of both their successes and failures. We will develop the basic tools of microeconomic analysis and then applying those tools to topics of policy interest such as pollution control, competition policy, health care, international trade policy, income distribution, tax policy, and the role of government in a market economy.