- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
The big picture: analyzing economy-wide phenomena such as growth, inflation and unemployment. Contrast with microeconomics, the study of the behavior of individual markets, workers, households and firms. Although economists generally separate themselves into distinct macro and micro camps, macroeconomic phenomena are the product of all the microeconomic activity in an economy. The precise relationship between macro and micro is not particularly well understood, which has often made it difficult for a government to deliver well-run macroeconomic policy.
Industry:Economy
The time taken to find a new job. Because some people will devote all their time to this search, there will always be some frictional unemployment, even when there is otherwise full employment.
Industry:Economy
Exports and imports of things you cannot touch or see: services, such as banking or advertising and other intangibles, such as copyrights. Invisible trade accounts for a growing slice of the value of world trade.
Industry:Economy
Putting money to work, in the hope of making even more money. Investment takes two main forms: direct spending on buildings, machinery and so forth, and indirect spending on financial securities, such as bonds and shares. Traditionally, economic theory says that a country’s total investment must equal its total savings. But this has never been true in the short run and, as a result of globalization, may never be even in the long run, as countries with low savings can attract investment from overseas and foreign savers lacking opportunities at home can invest abroad (see foreign direct investment). The more of its GDP a country invests, the faster its economy should grow. This is why governments try so hard to increase total investment, for instance, using tax breaks and subsidies, or direct public spending on infrastructure. However, recent evidence suggests that the best way to encourage private-sector investment is to pursue stable macroeconomic policies, with low inflation, low interest rates and low rates of taxation. Curiously, economic studies have not found evidence that higher levels of investment lead to higher rates of GDP growth. One explanation for this is that the circumstances and manner in which money is invested count at least as much as the total sums invested. It ain’t how much you do, it’s the way that you do it.
Industry:Economy
A helping hand for poor countries from rich countries. This, at least, is the intention. In practice, in many cases aid has done little good for its intended recipients (improved health care is a notable exception) and has sometimes made matters worse. Poor countries that receive lots of aid grow no faster, on average, than those that receive very little. By contrast, perhaps the most successful aid program ever – the Marshall plan for rebuilding Europe after the second world war – involved rich countries giving to other hitherto rich countries. During the second half of the 20th century rich countries gave over $1 trillion in aid to poor ones. During the 1990s, however, flows of official aid stagnated. In 2001, official aid was a little over $50 billion, roughly one quarter of the GDP of donor countries. On top of this were private-sector donations from NGOs (non-government organizations) worth an estimated $6 billion. Increasingly, such sums were exceeded by private foreign direct investment. In an attempt to reinvigorate international aid, in 2000 the UN committed itself to eight ambitious Millennium Development Goals for reducing global poverty by 2015. Why has aid achieved so little? Donations have often ended up in the offshore bank accounts of corrupt politicians and officials in poor countries. Money has often been given with strings attached, so that much of this “tied” aid is spent on com¬panies and corrupt politicians and officials in the donor country. War has ravaged many potentially beneficial aid projects. Moreover, some aid has been motivated by political goals – for example, shoring up anti-communist governments – rather than economic ones. The lesson of history is that aid will often be wasted unless it is carefully aimed at countries with a genuine commitment to sound economic management. Analysis by the World Bank sorted 56 aid-receiving countries by the quality of their economic management. Those with good policies (low inflation, a budget surplus and openness to trade) and good institutions (little corruption, strong rule of law, effective bureaucracy) benefited from the aid they received. Those with poor policies and institutions did not. This accounts for the growing popularity of conditionality in aid.
Industry:Economy
Interest is usually expressed at an annual rate: the amount of interest that would be paid during a year divided by the amount of money loaned. Developed economies offer many different interest rates, reflecting the length of the loan and the riskiness and wealth of the borrower. People often use the term “interest rate” when they mean the short-term interest rate charged to banks. For instance, when a central bank raises or cuts interest rates, it changes only the price it charges to banks borrowing money overnight, expressed as an annual rate. Bond yields are a better measure of the interest rate on loans that do not have to be repaid for many years. Unlike short-term interest rates, bond yields are determined not by central bankers but by the supply and demand for money, which is heavily influenced by the expected rate of inflation.
Industry:Economy
The cost of borrowing, which compensates lenders for the risk they take in making their money available to borrowers. Without interest there would be little lending and thus a lot less economic activity. The charging of interest is contrary to Sharia (Islamic) law, being considered usury. Some American states also have usury laws, imposing tough conditions on the terms set by lenders, although not actually prohibiting interest. Yet, as the recent rise of a substantial banking industry in Islamic Middle Eastern countries shows, when economic growth is a priority, ways can usually be found to pay lenders to lend.
Industry:Economy
In economic terms, anything used to reduce the downside of risk. In its most familiar form, insurance is provided through a policy purchased from an insurance company. But a fuller definition would also include, say, a financial security (or anything else) used to hedge, as well as assistance available in the event of disaster. It could even be provided by the government, in various ways, including welfare payments to sick or poor people and legal protection from creditors in the event of bankruptcy. Conventional insurance works by pooling the risks of many people (or firms, and so on), all of whom might claim but in practice only a few actually do. The cost of providing assistance to those that claim is spread over all the potential claimants, thus making the insurance affordable to all. Despite the enormous attraction of insurance, private markets in insurance often work badly, or not at all. Economists have identified three main reasons for this. * Private firms are unwilling to provide insurance if they are uncertain about the likely cost of providing sufficient cover, especially if it is potentially unlimited. * moral hazard means that people with insurance may take greater risks because they know they are protected, so the insurer may get a bigger bill than it bargained for. * Insurers are at risk of adverse selection. The people who are most likely to claim buy insurance, and those who are least likely to claim do not buy it. In this situation, setting a price for insurance that will generate enough premiums to cover all claims is tricky, if not impossible. Insurers have found ways of reducing the impact of these problems. For example, to counter adverse selection, they set higher health-insurance rates for people who smoke. To limit moral hazard, they offer reduced premiums to people who agree to pay the first so-many dollars or pounds of any claim. An efficient system of insurance, in its broadest sense, can contribute to economic growth by encouraging entrepreneurial risk taking and by enabling people to choose which risks they take and which they protect themselves against.
Industry:Economy
The economic arteries and veins. Roads, ports, railways, airports, power lines, pipes and wires that enable people, goods, commodities, water, energy and information to move about efficiently. Increasingly, infrastructure is regarded as a crucial source of economic competitiveness. Investment in infrastructure can yield unusually high returns because it increases people’s choices: of where to live and work, what to consume, what sort of economic activities to carry out, and of other people to communicate with. Some parts of a country’s infrastructure may be a natural monopoly, such as water pipes. Others, such as traffic lights, may be public goods. Some may have a network effect, such as telephone cables. Each of these factors has encouraged government provision of infra¬structure, often with the familiar downsides of state intervention: bad planning, inefficient delivery and corruption.
Industry:Economy
Rising prices, across the board. Inflation means less bang for your buck, as it erodes the purchasing power of a unit of currency. Inflation usually refers to consumer prices, but it can also be applied to other prices (wholesale goods, wages, assets, and so on). It is usually expressed as an annual percentage rate of change on an index number. For much of human history inflation has not been an important part of economic life. Before 1930, prices were as likely to fall as rise during any given year, and in the long run these ups and downs usually cancelled each other out. By contrast, by the end of the 20th century, 60-year-old Americans had seen prices rise by over 1,000% during their lifetime. The most spectacular period of inflation in industrialized countries took place during the 1970s, partly as a result of sharp increases in oil prices implemented by the OPEC cartel. Although these countries have mostly regained control over inflation since the 1980s, it continued to be a source of serious problems in many developing countries. Inflation would not do much damage if it were predictable, as everybody could build into their decision making the prospect of higher prices in future. In practice, it is unpredictable, which means that people are often surprised by price increases. This reduces economic efficiency, not least because people take fewer risks to minimize the chances of suffering too severely from a price shock. The faster the rate of inflation, the harder it is to predict future inflation. Indeed, this uncertainty can cause people to lose confidence in a currency as a store of value. This is why hyper-inflation is so damaging. Most economists agree that an economy is most likely to function efficiently if inflation is low. Ideally, macroeconomic policy should aim for stable prices. Some economists argue that a low level of inflation can be a good thing, however, if it is a result of innovation. New products are launched at high prices, which quickly come down through competition. Most economists reckon that deflation (falling average prices) is best avoided. To keep inflation low you need to know what causes it. Economists have plenty of theories but no absolutely cast-iron conclusions. Inflation, Milton Friedman once said, “is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. Monetarists reckon that to stabilize prices the rate of growth of the money supply needs to be carefully controlled. However, implementing this has proven difficult, as the relationship between measures of the money supply identified by monetarists and the rate of inflation has typically broken down as soon as policymakers have tried to target it. Keynesian economists believe that inflation can occur independently of monetary conditions. Other economists focus on the importance of institutional factors, such as whether the interest rate is set by politicians or (preferably) by an independent central bank, and whether that central bank is set an inflation target. Is there a relationship between inflation and the level of unemployment? In the 1950s, the Phillips curve seemed to indicate that policymakers could trade off higher inflation for lower unemployment. Later experience suggested that although inflating the economy could lower unemployment in the short run, in the long run you ended up with unemployment at least as high as before and rising inflation as well. Economists then came up with the idea of the NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment), the rate of unemployment below which inflation would start to accelerate. However, in the late 1990s, in both the United States and the UK, the unemployment rate fell well below what most economists thought was the NAIRU yet inflation did not pick up. This caused some economists to argue that technological and other changes wrought by the new economy meant that inflation was dead. Traditionalists said it was merely resting.
Industry:Economy
