Some reasons why we should teach matrices to students of economics

The paper makes up the second part of the series of articles aimed at establishing the usefulness of matrices in the study of contemporary economic sciences. The series was initiated by the present author in his previous article of this subject (Rybicki, 2010). The items chosen to be presented here concern applications of (operating with) matrices in the field of welfare economics and to the description dynamics of economic systems. The first class of matrices we discuss serves as tools for indicating the inequalities of distributions of (finite) commodity bundles (and as devices to “equalize” these distributions). Other considered families of matrices consist of transition matrices of Markov chains. The presented statements are of an elementary character – they are intended to help students feel (and believe in) some uniformity of the content of lectures on mathematics and economics and (in a wider sense) operations research.