Teaching Fiscal Policy to Develop Fiscal Conversations: Beyond a Shift in the IS curve

This chapter discusses how we can help our students to engage in richer and more informed fiscal conversations. Our premise is that the teaching of fiscal policy can become too focused on analysing its effectiveness within model frameworks such as IS-LM (or MP). Consequently, students are less well-placed to engage with the broad array of fiscal conversations that comes from a greater exposure to concepts and ideas that might otherwise come only from public finance modules. We discuss therefore how students of macroeconomics can benefit from a broader engagement with fiscal policy that provides them with a greater awareness and understanding the public finances and, in turn, real-world fiscal choices. By doing so we can connect students directly with fiscal choices. This would seem to be more important than ever given the scale of scope of recent fiscal interventions and, hence, the context in which governments around the world find themselves making fiscal choices.