- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
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Shorthand for gilt-edged securities, meaning a safe bet, at least as far as receiving interest and avoiding default goes. The price of gilts can vary considerably over time, however, creating a degree of risk for investors. Usually the term is applied only to government bonds.
Industry:Economy
Named after Robert Giffen (1837-1910), a good for which demand increases as its price rises. But such goods may not exist in the real world.
Industry:Economy
A relatively new way of analyzing fiscal policy by identifying the financial costs and benefits of government policies to people of different ages, now living or yet to be born. Fiscal policy can distribute resources between different generations, sometimes deliberately and often inadvertently. At any moment in time, one generation may be in work and paying taxes that support other generations (those at school or retired) that are not working. Over its lifetime, one generation's mix of taxes paid and benefits received may differ sharply from that of another generation. Politicians are often tempted to ignore the needs of future generations (who, clearly, cannot vote at the time) in order to win the support of current generations, for instance by borrowing heavily to fund current spending. More fundamentally, because it incorporates all the tax and spending, current and future, to which a government is committed, generational accounting is a much better guide to whether fiscal policy is sustainable than measures such as the budget deficit, which looks only at taxes and spending in the current year.
Industry:Economy
Economic perfection. This is when demand and supply are in balance (the market is in equilibrium) for each and every good and service in the economy. Nobody thinks that real-world economies can ever be that perfect; at best there is "partial equilibrium". But most economists think that general equilibrium is something worth aspiring to.
Industry:Economy
The vehicle for promoting international free trade, through a series of rounds of negotiations between the governments of trading countries. The first GATT round began in 1945. The last led to the establishment of the world trade organization in 1995.
Industry:Economy
A company's debt expressed as a percentage of its equity; also known as leverage. (See also capital structure and leveraged buy-out. )
Industry:Economy
How to win at Twister? No, but maybe at monopoly. Game theory is a technique for analyzing how people, firms and governments should behave in strategic situations (in which they must interact with each other), and in deciding what to do must take into account what others are likely to do and how others might respond to what they do. For instance, competition between two firms can be analyzed as a game in which firms play to achieve a long-term competitive advantage (perhaps even a monopoly). The theory helps each firm to develop its optimal strategy for, say, pricing its products and deciding how much to produce; it can help the firm to anticipate in advance what its competitor will do and shows how best to respond if the competitor does something unexpected. It is particularly useful for understanding behavior in monopolistic competition. In game theory, which can be used to describe anything from wage negotiations to arms races, a dominant strategy is one that will deliver the best results for the player, regardless of what anybody else does. One finding of game theory is that there may be a large first-mover advantage for companies that beat their rivals into a new market or come up with an innovation. One special case identified by the theory is the zero-sum game, where players see that the total winnings are fixed; for some to do well, others must lose. Far better is the positive-sum game, in which competitive interaction has the potential to make all the players richer. Another problem analyzed by game theorists is the prisoners' dilemma. (See also Nash equilibrium. )
Industry:Economy
Where the usual rules of a person or firm’s home country do not apply. It can be literally offshore, as in the case of investors moving their money to a Caribbean island tax haven. Or it can be merely legally offshore, as in the case of certain financial transactions that take place within, say, the City of London, which are deemed for regulatory purposes to have taken place offshore.
Industry:Economy
When a few firms dominate a market. Often they can together behave as if they were a single monopoly, perhaps by forming a cartel. Or they may collude informally, by preferring gentle non-price competition to a bloody price war. Because what one firm can do depends on what the other firms do, the behavior of oligopolists is hard to predict. When they do compete on price, they may produce as much and charge as little as if they were in a market with perfect competition.
Industry:Economy
A description of what happens to unemployment when the rate of growth of GDP changes, based on empirical research by Arthur Okun (1928–80). It predicts that if GDP grows at around 3% a year, the jobless rate will be unchanged. If it grows faster, the unemployment rate will fall by half of what the growth rate exceeds 3% by; that is, if GDP grows by 5%, unemployment will fall by 1 percentage point. Likewise, a lesser, say 2%, increase in GDP would be associated with a half a percentage point increase in the jobless rate. This relationship is not carved in stone, as it merely reflects the American economy during the period studied by Okun. Even so, in most economies Okun’s Law is a reasonable rule of thumb for estimating the likely impact on jobs of changes in output.
Industry:Economy
