- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
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The true cost of something is what you give up to get it. This includes not only the money spent in buying (or doing) the something, but also the economic benefits (utility) that you did without because you bought (or did) that particular something and thus can no longer buy (or do) something else. For example, the opportunity cost of choosing to train as a lawyer is not merely the tuition fees, price of books, and so on, but also the fact that you are no longer able to spend your time holding down a salaried job or developing your skills as a footballer. These lost opportunities may represent a significant loss of utility. Going for a walk may appear to cost nothing, until you consider the opportunity forgone to use that time earning money. Everything you do has an opportunity cost (see shadow price). Economics is primarily about the efficient use of scarce resources, and the notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that resources are indeed being used efficiently.
Industry:Economy
Although such groups have existed for generations (in the early 1800s, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society played a powerful part in abolishing slavery laws), recent social and economic shifts have given these typically voluntary, non-profit, “issue-driven” organizations new life. The collapse of communism, the spread of democracy, technological change and economic integration (globalization, in short) have each helped NGOs grow. Globalization itself has exacerbated a host of worries about the environment, labor rights, human rights, consumer rights, and so on. Democratization and technological progress have revolutionized the way in which citizens can unite to express their disquiet. Governments have been at the sharp end of pressure from NGOs. Arguably, however, it is inter-governmental institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, the UN agencies and the world trade organization (WTO) that have felt it more, owing to their lack of political leverage. Few parliamentarians will face direct pressure from the IMF or the WTO, but every policymaker faces pressure from citizens’ groups with special interests. Add to this the poor public image that these technocratic, faceless bureaucracies have developed, and it is hardly surprising that they are popular targets for NGO “swarms”. How governments and inter-governmental organizations respond to NGOs could have huge implications, including for the world’s economies. Equally important will be how NGOs themselves respond to greater scrutiny and to growing concern about how accountable they are, and to whom.
Industry:Economy
The value of anything expressed simply in the money of the day. Since inflation means that money can lose its value over time, nominal figures can be misleading when used to compare values in different periods. It is better to compare their real value, by adjusting the nominal figures to remove the inflationary distortions.
Industry:Economy
The sixth annual prize established in memory of Alfred Nobel. Strictly speaking, this is not a fully fledged Nobel prize, as it was not mentioned in Nobel’s will, unlike the five prizes established earlier for peace, literature, medicine, chemistry and physics. Still, the title of Nobel laureate and the $1m award stumped up each year by Sweden’s central bank make it worth winning. Since 1969, when its first (joint) winners hailed from Norway and the Netherlands, it has been won mostly by American economists, many of them of the Chicago school.
Industry:Economy
Trying to win business from rivals other than by charging a lower price. Methods include advertising, slightly differentiating your product, improving its quality, or offering free gifts or discounts on subsequent purchases. Non-price competition is particularly common when there is an oligopoly, perhaps because it can give an impression of fierce rivalry while the firms are actually colluding to keep prices high.
Industry:Economy
When a government takes ownership of a private-sector business. Nationalization was a fashionable part of the mix in countries with a mixed economy between 1945 and 1980, after which the privatization of state-owned firms became increasingly popular. The amount of public ownership in different countries has always varied considerably. Nationalization has taken place for various reasons, ranging from socialist ideology to attempts to remedy examples of market failure. The performance of nationalized firms has often, but not always, been poor compared with their private-sector counterparts. State-owned businesses often enjoy a legally protected monopoly, and the lack of competition means the firms face little pressure to be efficient. Politicians often interfere in important management decisions, making it harder to take unpopular actions on pay, factory closures and job cuts, particularly when there are strong public-sector trade unions and a union-friendly government. Politically imposed financial constraints may also force public-sector firms to underinvest. Although privatization has not been universally beneficial, on balance it has increased economic efficiency.
Industry:Economy
The total outstanding borrowing of a country’s government (usually including national and local government). It is often described as a burden, although public debt may have economic benefits (see balanced budget, fiscal policy and golden rule). Certainly, debt incurred by one generation may become a heavy burden for later generations, especially if the money borrowed is not invested wisely. The national debt is a total of all the money ever raised by a government that has yet to be paid off; this is very different from an annual public-sector budget deficit. In 1999, the American government celebrated a huge budget surplus, yet the country still had a national debt equal to nearly half its GDP.
Industry:Economy
A controversial phrase, which actually means little more than the lowest rate of unemployment at which the jobs market can be in stable equilibrium. Keynesians, encouraged by the Phillips curve, assumed that a government could lower the rate of unemployment if it was willing to accept a little more inflation. However, economists such as Milton Friedman argued that this supposed inflation-for-jobs trade-off was in fact a trap. Governments that tolerated higher inflation in the hope of lowering unemployment would find that joblessness dipped only briefly before returning to its previous level, while inflation would rise and stay high. Instead, they argued, unemployment has an equilibrium or natural rate, determined not by the amount of demand in an economy but by the structure of the labor market. This is the lowest level of unemployment at which inflation will remain stable. When unemployment is above the natural rate demand can potentially be increased to bring it to the natural rate, but attempting to lower it even further will only cause inflation to accelerate. Hence the natural rate is also known as the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU. At first, the NAIRU became synonymous with the view that macroeconomic policy could not conquer unemployment. It was often used to justify policy inaction even when unemployment rose to more than 10% of workers in industrialized countries during the 1980s and 1990s, even though economists’ estimates of the NAIRU differed hugely. More recently, economists looking for ways to reduce unemployment have started to ask whether, and under what circumstances, the natural rate might change. Most solutions have stressed the need to make more people employable at the prevailing level of wages, in particular by increasing labor market flexibility. Economists still disagree over what jobless rate at any particular point in time is the NAIRU, but nobody any longer thinks that the natural rate is fixed. Indeed, some think the concept has no meaning at all.
Industry:Economy
Creating a country that works out of one that does not - because the old order has collapsed (as in the former Soviet Union), or been destroyed by war (Iraq), or never really functioned in the first place (Afghanistan). To transform a failed country can involve establishing order through the rule of law and creating legitimate government and other effective social institutions, as well as a credible currency and a functioning market economy. Nation building is rarely easy, and often fiendishly difficult, especially where there are deep ethnic, religious or political divisions in the population or the country has no history of ever functioning effectively. Outside expertise, such as from the World Bank, and money (as in, most famously, the Marshall plan) can help, but they are no guarantee of success.
Industry:Economy
In the last years of the 20th century, some economists argued that developments in information technology and globalization had given birth to a new economy (first, in the United States), which had a higher rate of productivity and growth than the old economy it replaced. Some went further, adding that in the new economy inflation was dead, the business cycle abolished and the traditional rules of economics were redundant. These claims were highly controversial. Other economists pointed out that similar predictions had been made during earlier periods of rapid technological change, yet the nature of economics was not fundamentally altered. With the bursting of the dotcom stock market bubble in 2000, the phrase fell into disuse, although productivity continued to soar, thanks not least to new technology, especially in the United States.
Industry:Economy
