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Concepts of Economic
Basic Concepts of Economics
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Economics | The study of scarcity and choice. |
Individual Choice | The decisions by individuals about what to do, which necessarily involve decisions about what not to do. |
Economy | A system for coordinating a society's productive and consumptive activities. |
Market Economy | An economy in which the decision of individual producers and consumers largely determine what, how and for whom to produce, with little government involvement in the decisions. |
Incentives | Rewards or punishments that motivate particular choices. |
Property Rights | Establish ownership and grant individuals the right to trade goods and services with each other. |
Resource | Anything that can be used to produce something else. |
Land | All resources that come from nature, such as minerals, timber, petroleum, water, etc. |
Labor | The effort of workers. |
Capital | Manufactured goods used to make other goods and services, machinery, buildings and tools. |
Entrepreneurship | The efforts of entrepreneurs in organizing resources for production, taking risks to create new enterprises, and innovating to develop new products and production processes. In short, "the brains behind the operation." |
Scarce | A resource that is not available in sufficient quantities to satisfy all the various ways a society wants to use it. |
Opportunity Cost | The real cost of an item is this: what you must give up in order to get it. |
Microeconomics | The study of how individuals, firms and households make decisions and how those decisions interact. |
Macroeconomics | The study of the overall ups and downs of the economy. |
Economic aggregates | Economic measures that summarize data across many different markets. |
Positive Economics | The branch of economic analysis that describes the way the economy actually works. |
Normative Economics | The branch of economics that makes prescriptions about the way the economy SHOULD work. |
Utility | Economic term meaning happiness or satisfaction. Marginal |
Marginal | Economic term meaning additional, extra or next. |