Small and medium enterprise strength comes from the ability of smaller firms to react quickly and flexibly to adapt to market realities and to take advantage of opportunities that would not be an advantage to larger firms. Small enterprises grow to medium enterprises as they are increasingly able to develop the resources to expand out of their local economic system. Thousands of small companies operating at the micro level, taking advantage of local resources and opportunities, form the base of a healthy economy by providing local services, jobs and supplying or processing for larger firms and markets.
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and micro enterprises in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries account for over 95% of all firms, 60-70% of employment and 55% of GDP and create the majority of new jobs, indicating the impact SMEs have on employment. In contrast, currently over 80% of Rwandans are engaged in agricultural production. The SME sector, including formal and informal businesses, comprises 98% of the businesses in Rwanda and 41% of all private sector employment — though the formalized sector has much growth potential with only 300,000 currently employed. Most micro and small enterprises employ up to four people, showing that growth in the sector would create significant private sector non-agricultural employment opportunities (Ministry of Trade and Industry, 2010). Therefore, the broad objective of this course is to enable the students develop the competence and skills to identify some strategies for developing and managing small and medium enterprises with a focus on agribusiness sector.
The module of Farm Management and Agriculture Finance deals with the general concepts, principles and methods of farm management as well as the aspects and challenges of financing agriculture. Without being exhaustive, the course will address the economic principles of agricultural production, the different approaches and tools for farm management: economic, analytical, systemic and strategic as well as the risk in agriculture and the role of the different actors. The course will also provide students with skills for developing a strategic plan for the development of farms using economic optimization tools (General Algebraic Modeling Systems, GAMS) and development of a technical management advice report and decision making tools for technical and economic direction of the farm.
Agribusiness Value Chain Management is designed to develop the student’s knowledge of agricultural systems, finance and human resource management and provides a detailed insight into marketing and the industries supporting agricultural production, processing, transportation and supply chain strategy
Brief description of the Module
This course teaches the fundamentals of microeconomic concepts of supply and demand analysis in the context of organized agricultural firms and individual firms. The course is designed to provide learners with tools to analyse and formulate solutions to problems faced in small-holder farming systems with special emphasis on challenges faced by women. After a brief review of mathematical applications in microeconomics, the course focuses on lectures and problem sets with solution keys illustrating the concept application.
Course Objectives
This course provides a theoretical foundation in Economics and its application for almost all other courses in the programme. Specifically, the course is intended to enable students to:
- Acquire adequate knowledge of producer and consumer behavior.
- Understand analytical tools and skills needed for conceptualizing a real-world microeconomic problems
- Apply microeconomic principles to solve agricultural, food, rural development, and welfare problems.
Learning Outcomes
Having successfully completed the module, learners should be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of: Advanced theories in microeconomics such as consumer and producer behaviour, market analysis, welfare economics, game theory and economics of information, as well as gender dynamics in microeconomic decision-making.
By the end of the course, the students should be able to understand:
- Consumer theory and its applications
- Theory of the firm and its applications
- The fundamental theorems of welfare economics and their applications.
Course Materials
- Hal, Varian. (2006). Intermediate Microeconomics -The Modern Approach, W.W. Norton & Co. New York.
- Hal, Varian. (1992). Microeconomic Analysis. 3rd Edition. W.W. Norton & Co. New York.
- Sanjay Rode. (2013). Modern Microeconomics. 1st Edition. Bookboon.com. Ventus Publishing ApS. ISBN 978-87-403-0419-0
- Nicholson, W., and Snyder. (2017). Microeconomic Theory: Basic Principles and Extensions, 12th Edition. London: South-Western (Thomas Learning).
- Binger, Brian, and Elizabeth Hoffman. 1998. Microeconomics with Calculus, 2nd Edition. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.
- Hugh Gravelle and Ray Rees. (2004). Microeconomics (3rd Edition). Pearson Education Limited, UK.
- Geoffrey A. Jehle and Philip J. Reny. (2011) Advanced Microeconomic Theory. Prentice Hall
- Baumol, William J. 1999. Economic Theory and Operations Analysis, 4th Edition. New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India.
- Wolfstetter, E. (1999), Topics in Microeconomics, Cambridge University Press
- Bolton, P., Dewatripont, M. (2005), Contract Theory, MIT Press
- Campbell, D.E. (2006), Incentives, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press
- Vega-Redondo, F. (2003), Economics and the Theory of Games, Cambridge University Press
- World Development (Vol. 23, No. 11, 1995) Special Issue - Gender and Economics
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0305750X/23/11
- Mascia-Lees, Frances E. (2010). The global economy, neoliberalism, and labor. In Gender and difference in a globalizing world, (pp. 162–177), Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
The main purpose of this course is to increase the understanding of econometrics and its usages in various analyses. It allows students to be more acquainted with practical consequences of violation of assumptions such as heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation. The course takes an extra mile compared to econometrics 1 obtained at undergraduate and introduces other new concepts that are linked to the analysis of limited dependent variables (for the case of discrete choice models) and the impact assessment of programs and policies using econometrics. The course gives an opportunity for more advanced practical analysis using some case studies applied to Rwanda so as to testing of various assumptions learn from the theoretical part of the course with the application of Stata package for data processing and analysis.
This course will introduce learners to classic macroeconomic issues such as growth, inflation, unemployment, monetary and fiscal policies such as interest rates and exchange rates. Learners will become familiar with the measuring of these macroeconomic variables and how different shocks to the economy affect macroeconomic policy in an open economy. The course analyzes different scenarios of growth with at least two case studies from the East African region. Analytical tools will enable learners to understand Rwanda’s macroeconomic performance and how different internal and external economic shocks affect specific macroeconomic policies.
Understanding of gender relevance to Socio-economic sciences requires thorough comprehension of socio-economic challenges confronting Rwanda. Men and women play very distinct roles in Rwandan society and they live these roles very differently. The social and economic systems are human constructs. Learners should understand these constructs, their mechanisms and relations at play within these constructs. Equal participation of men and women in the labour market is fundamental for the attainment of growth, employment and competitiveness. Trends in society result from human actions, interactions, roles and behaviour; therefore they have a gender dimension. Social, economic and developmental objectives are interlinked and highly gender-sensitive. Learners need to understand and know how to consider these issues in a macro economics. This module will equip learners with Gender knowledge and skills as a relevant variable to be addressed in all socio-economic activities in the agricultural sectors.