ECO 543 Economic Aspects of Globalization. The course will make students understand what are the underlying forces that have restructured the global economy into how we know it to be today. It will provide a brief historical explanation of the development of international economic relations and of the growing role of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations. Then, it will explain from a microeconomic perspective the most important aspects of these two closely related phenomena.The foreign direct investment (FDI) is an operation through which a multinational corporation (MNC) acquires a substantial control over a domestic firm in the target economy. Net investment inflows represent several percent of GDP in both developed and developing countries nowadays and sales of the biggest MNCs are larger than GDP of many developed economies.In the course, we will clarify why companies invest abroad and what incentives are most likely to attract foreign investors. We will explain the complex relationship between FDI and international trade and we will describe the impact of FDI on less developed countries. We will explain why MNCs are accused of being too economically powerful and why NGOs fight to make them to accept the idea of corporate responsibility.For this purpose, we will use academic papers, reports of international economic organizations, and articles from press. We will illustrate the studied concepts on elementary microeconomic models and we will evaluate them by using simple quantitative analyses.