Environmental Economics and Policy

1. General Economics
The principles of the economy. Market forces. Elasticity. Supply, demand and economic policy. Consumers, producers and market efficiency. Taxation and its cost. International Trade. Public assets and collective resources.
2. Business Economics
The production costs. The companies in the competitive market. Oligopoly.
3. Macroeconomics
Measure the income of a nation. Measuring the cost of living. Production and growth. Savings, investment and financial system. The basic tools of finance. Keynes and the IS-LM model. Aggregate demand and aggregate supply. The influence of monetary and fiscal policy on aggregate demand. The occupation.
4. Environmental Economics
Environment and production system. The theory of natural capital and sustainable development. Private costs and social costs. Standards command and control. Environmental taxes. Incentives and artificial markets. Life cycle assessment and environmental audits. Responsibility of consumers and producers. Evaluation of public and private projects. The value of environmental assets. Non-tradable assets and services on the market. The components of the economic value. Methods of assessment of environmental assets. Environmental damage. Payments for environmental services.

1 - Introduction: concepts and terminology; differences between GIS and CAD systems; fields of application and purposes (decision making and environmental management).
2 - Cartographic concepts: map scale, projection and coordinate systems; difference between traditional cartographic approaches and digital ones.
3 - Data structure: geometric component (raster and vector); descriptive component (tables); topological component (relations among objects); time component.
4 - Digital data entry; maps scanning and digital conversion; georeferencing; manual and/or automatic digitizing; topology definition (arc-node relations; arc direction, inclusion, adjacency); database design and implementation; cartographic symbols; final controls (constrain controls and test plots).
5 - Database: general concepts (records, fields, key-fields); normalization theory; Join and Relate operations; query (mathematical, conditional and logical operators).