Portal:Economics
Introduction
Economics (/ˌɛkəˈnɒmɪks, ˌiːkə-/) is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings, and investment expenditure interact, and factors affecting it: factors of production, such as labour, capital, land, and enterprise, inflation, economic growth, and public policies that have impact on these elements. It also seeks to analyse and describe the global economy. (Full article...)
Selected general articles
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Economic statistics is a topic in applied statistics and applied economics that concerns the collection, processing, compilation, dissemination, and analysis of economic data. It is closely related to business statistics and econometrics. It is also common to call the data themselves "economic statistics", but for this usage, "economic data" is the more common term. (Full article...) -
Microeconomics analyzes the market mechanisms that enable buyers and sellers to establish relative prices among goods and services. Shown is a marketplace in Delhi.
Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the economy as a whole, which is studied in macroeconomics.
One goal of microeconomics is to analyze the market mechanisms that establish relative prices among goods and services and allocate limited resources among alternative uses[citation needed]. Microeconomics shows conditions under which free markets lead to desirable allocations. It also analyzes market failure, where markets fail to produce efficient results. (Full article...) -
Karl Gunnar Myrdal (/ˈmɜːrdɑːl, ˈmɪər-/ MUR-dahl, MEER-; Swedish: [ˈɡɵ̌nːar ˈmy̌ːɖɑːl]; 6 December 1898 – 17 May 1987) was a Swedish economist and sociologist. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." When his wife, Alva Myrdal, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982, they became the fourth ever married couple to have won Nobel Prizes, and the first and only to win independent of each other (versus a shared Nobel Prize by scientist spouses).
Myrdal is best known in the United States for his study of race relations, which culminated in his book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. The study was influential in the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. In Sweden, his work and political influence were important to the establishment of the Folkhemmet and the welfare state. (Full article...) -
Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was a Dutch-American mathematician and economist. He was the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of the optimum allocation of resources. Koopmans showed that on the basis of certain efficiency criteria, it is possible to make important deductions concerning optimum price systems. (Full article...) -
Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras (French: [valʁas]; 16 December 1834 – 5 January 1910) was a French mathematical economist and Georgist. He formulated the marginal theory of value (independently of William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger) and pioneered the development of general equilibrium theory. Walras is best known for his book Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium. The definition of the role of the entrepreneur found in it was also taken up and amplified by Joseph Schumpeter.
For Walras, exchanges only take place after a Walrasian tâtonnement (French for "trial and error"), guided by the auctioneer, has made it possible to reach market equilibrium. It was the general equilibrium obtained from a single hypothesis, rarity, that led Joseph Schumpeter to consider him "the greatest of all economists". The notion of general equilibrium was very quickly adopted by major economists such as Vilfredo Pareto, Knut Wicksell and Gustav Cassel. John Hicks and Paul Samuelson used the Walrasian contribution in the elaboration of the neoclassical synthesis. For their part, Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu, from the perspective of a logician and a mathematician, determined the conditions necessary for equilibrium. (Full article...) -
Richer countries tend to be happier than poorer countries (observations are lined up around an upward-sloping trend), and richer people within countries tend to be happier than poorer people in the same countries (arrows are consistently pointing northeast).
The economics of happiness or happiness economics is the theoretical, qualitative and quantitative study of happiness and quality of life, including positive and negative affects, well-being, life satisfaction and related concepts – typically tying economics more closely than usual with other social sciences, like sociology and psychology, as well as physical health. It typically treats subjective happiness-related measures, as well as more objective quality of life indices, rather than wealth, income or profit, as something to be maximized.
The field has grown substantially since the late 20th century, for example by the development of methods, surveys and indices to measure happiness and related concepts, as well as quality of life. Happiness findings have been described as a challenge to the theory and practice of economics. Nevertheless, furthering gross national happiness, as well as a specified Index to measure it, has been adopted explicitly in the Constitution of Bhutan in 2008, to guide its economic governance. (Full article...) -
Arthur Cecil Pigou (/ˈpiːɡuː/; 18 November 1877 – 7 March 1959) was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly served on several public committees, including the Cunliffe Committee and the 1919 Royal Commission on income tax. (Full article...) -
Marginalism is a theory of economics that attempts to explain the discrepancy in the value of goods and services by reference to their secondary, or marginal, utility. It states that the reason why the price of diamonds is higher than that of water, for example, owes to the greater additional satisfaction of the diamonds over the water. Thus, while the water has greater total utility, the diamond has greater marginal utility.
Although the central concept of marginalism is that of marginal utility, marginalists, following the lead of Alfred Marshall, drew upon the idea of marginal physical productivity in explanation of cost. The neoclassical tradition that emerged from British marginalism abandoned the concept of utility and gave marginal rates of substitution a more fundamental role in analysis. Marginalism is an integral part of mainstream economic theory. (Full article...) -
Thermoeconomics, also referred to as biophysical economics, is a school of heterodox economics that applies the laws of statistical mechanics to economic theory. Thermoeconomics can be thought of as the statistical physics of economic value and is a subfield of econophysics.
It is the study of the ways and means by which human societies procure and use energy and other biological and physical resources to produce, distribute, consume and exchange goods and services, while generating various types of waste and environmental impacts. Biophysical economics builds on both social sciences and natural sciences to overcome some of the most fundamental limitations and blind spots of conventional economics. It makes it possible to understand some key requirements and framework conditions for economic growth, as well as related constraints and boundaries. (Full article...) -
Production and national income: Macroeconomics takes a big-picture view of the entire economy, including examining the roles of, and relationships between, firms, households and governments, and the different types of markets, such as the financial market and the labour market.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes national, regional, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP (gross domestic product) and national income, unemployment (including unemployment rates), price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
Macroeconomics and microeconomics are the two most general fields in economics. The focus of macroeconomics is often on a country (or larger entities like the whole world) and how its markets interact to produce large-scale phenomena that economists refer to as aggregate variables. In microeconomics the focus of analysis is often a single market, such as whether changes in supply or demand are to blame for price increases in the oil and automotive sectors.
From introductory classes in "principles of economics" through doctoral studies, the macro/micro divide is institutionalized in the field of economics. Most economists identify as either macro- or micro-economists. (Full article...) -
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher CBE (16 August 1911 – 4 September 1977) was a British statistician and economist who is best known for his proposals for human-scale, decentralised and appropriate technologies. He served as Chief Economic Advisor to the British National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970, and founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now known as Practical Action) in 1966.
In 1995, his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered was ranked by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books published since World War II. In 1977 he published A Guide for the Perplexed as a critique of materialistic scientism and as an exploration of the nature and organisation of knowledge. (Full article...) -
Physiocracy (French: physiocratie; from the Greek for "government of nature") is an economic theory developed by a group of 18th-century Age of Enlightenment French economists who believed that the wealth of nations derived solely from the value of "land agriculture" or "land development" and that agricultural products should be highly priced. Their theories originated in France and were most popular during the second half of the 18th century. Physiocracy became one of the first well-developed theories of economics.
François Quesnay (1694–1774), the marquis de Mirabeau (1715–1789) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) dominated the movement, which immediately preceded the first modern school, classical economics, which began with the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776. (Full article...) -
Frank Hyneman Knight (November 7, 1885 – April 15, 1972) was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School.
Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James M. Buchanan were all students of Knight at Chicago. Ronald Coase said that Knight, without teaching him, was a major influence on his thinking. F.A. Hayek considered Knight to be one of the major figures in preserving and promoting classical liberal thought in the twentieth century. (Full article...) -
Joan Violet Robinson FBA (née Maurice; 31 October 1903 – 5 August 1983) was a British economist known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. One of the most prominent economists of the century, Robinson incarnated the "Cambridge School" in most of its guises in the 20th century. She started out as a Marshallian, became one of the earliest and most ardent Keynesians after 1936, and ended up as a leader of the neo-Ricardian and post-Keynesian schools. (Full article...) -
Karl Paul Polanyi (/poʊˈlænji/; Hungarian: Polányi Károly [ˈpolaːɲi ˈkaːroj]; 25 October 1886 – 23 April 1964) was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.
In his writings, Polanyi advances the concept of the Double Movement, which refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push for social protection against that marketization. He argues that market-based societies in modern Europe were not inevitable but historically contingent. Polanyi is remembered best as the originator of substantivism, a cultural version of economics, which emphasizes the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This opinion is counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science. (Full article...) -
Oskar Ryszard Lange (27 July 1904 – 2 October 1965) was a Polish economist and diplomat. He is best known for advocating the use of market pricing tools in socialist systems and providing a model of market socialism. He responded to the economic calculation problem proposed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek by claiming that managers in a centrally-planned economy would be able to monitor supply and demand through increases and declines in inventories of goods, and advocated the nationalization of major industries. During his stay in the United States, Lange was an academic teacher and researcher in mathematical economics. Later in socialist Poland, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party. (Full article...) -
Mutualism is an anarchist school of thought and anti-capitalist market socialist economic theory that advocates for workers' control of the means of production, a market economy made up of individual artisans and workers' cooperatives, and occupation and use property rights. As proponents of the labour theory of value and labour theory of property, mutualists oppose all forms of economic rent, profit and non-nominal interest, which they see as relying on the exploitation of labour. Mutualists seek to construct an economy without capital accumulation or concentration of land ownership. They also encourage the establishment of workers' self-management, which they propose could be supported through the issuance of mutual credit by mutual banks, with the aim of creating a federal society.
Mutualism has its roots in the utopian socialism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. It first developed a practical expression in Josiah Warren's community experiments in the United States, which he established according to the principles of equitable commerce based on a system of labor notes. Mutualism was first formulated into a comprehensive economic theory by the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who proposed the abolition of unequal exchange and the establishment of a new economic system based on reciprocity. In order to establish such a system, he proposed the creation of a "People's Bank" that could issue mutual credit to workers and eventually replace the state; although his own attempts to establish such a system were foiled by the 1851 French coup d'état. (Full article...) -
Karl Marx (German: [kaʁl ˈmaʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the latter in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as The German Ideology (written 1846) and the Grundrisse (written 1857–1858). While in Paris in 1844, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital. From 1864, Marx was involved in the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he fought the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote on revolution, the state and the transition to communism. He died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. (Full article...) -
Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served as the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. He worked as a private adviser and provided consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC.
First nominated to the Federal Reserve by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, Greenspan was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position, behind only William McChesney Martin. President George W. Bush appointed Ben Bernanke as his successor.
Greenspan came to the Federal Reserve Board from a consulting career. Although he was subdued in his public appearances, favorable media coverage raised his profile to a point that several observers likened him to a "rock star". Democratic leaders of Congress criticized him for politicizing his office because of his support for Social Security privatization and tax cuts. (Full article...) -
The mythological judgement of Paris required selecting from three incomparable alternatives (the goddesses shown).
Decision theory or the theory of rational choice is a branch of probability, economics, and analytic philosophy that uses the tools of expected utility and probability to model how individuals should behave rationally under uncertainty. It differs from the cognitive and behavioral sciences in that it is prescriptive and concerned with identifying optimal decisions for a rational agent, rather than describing how people really do make decisions. Despite this, the field is important to the study of real human behavior by social scientists, as it lays the foundations for the rational agent models used to mathematically model and analyze individuals in fields such as sociology, economics, criminology, cognitive science, and political science. (Full article...) -
Behavioral economics is the study of the psychological (e.g. cognitive, behavioral, affective, social) factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions, and how these decisions deviate from those implied by traditional economic theory.
Behavioral economics is primarily concerned with the bounds of rationality of economic agents. Behavioral models typically integrate insights from psychology, neuroscience and microeconomic theory. (Full article...) -
Richard H. Thaler (/ˈθeɪlər/; born September 12, 1945) is an American economist and the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2015, Thaler was president of the American Economic Association.
Thaler is a theorist in behavioral economics who has collaborated with Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others in further defining that field. In 2018, he was elected a member in the National Academy of Sciences. (Full article...) -
Claude-Frédéric Bastiat (/bɑːstiˈɑː/; French: [klod fʁedeʁik bastja]; 30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850) was a French economist, writer and a prominent member of the French liberal school.
A member of the French National Assembly, Bastiat developed the economic concept of opportunity cost and introduced the parable of the broken window. He was described as "the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived" by economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter. (Full article...) -
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory".
Samuelson was one of the most influential economists of the latter half of the 20th century. In 1996, when he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Samuelson considered mathematics to be the "natural language" for economists and contributed significantly to the mathematical foundations of economics with his book Foundations of Economic Analysis. He was author of the best-selling economics textbook of all time: Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948. It was the second American textbook that attempted to explain the principles of Keynesian economics. (Full article...) -
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics: (Full article...)
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Did you know...
- ... that the petunia carnage of 2017 led to worldwide economic losses?
- ... that anti-Korean sentiment, due to South Korea's economic growth, motivated Djuna to write the sci-fi novel Counterweight?
- ... that in a study for UNICEF, Reginald Green found that more than two million children under the age of five had died in Angola and Mozambique due to the South African apartheid regime's economic policies?
- ... that people are robbing Lebanese banks to get their own money back?
- ... that a banker was named the prime minister of Equatorial Guinea after his predecessor resigned during an economic crisis?
- ... that soprano Galina Pisarenko studied economics, English, and Norwegian at the same time she was studying to become a professional opera singer?
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Selected images
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The U.S. unemployment rate from 1990 to 2022 (from Economics) -
An environmental scientist sampling water -
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The publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776 is considered to be the first formalisation of economic thought. -
São Paulo Stock Exchange in Brazil, an electronic trading network that brings together buyers and sellers through an electronic trading platform -
A basic illustration of a business cycle (from Economics) -
A 1638 painting of a French seaport during the heyday of mercantilism -
An example production–possibility frontier with illustrative points marked (from Economics) -
John Maynard Keynes, a key economics theorist (from Economics) -
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The supply and demand model describes how prices vary as a result of a balance between product availability and demand. The graph depicts an increase in demand from D1 to D2 and the resulting increase in price and quantity required to reach a new equilibrium point on the supply curve (S). -
Pollution can be a simple example of market failure; if costs of production are not borne by producers but are by the environment, accident victims or others, then prices are distorted. -
Economists study trade, production, and consumption decisions, including those that occur in a traditional marketplace -
List of countries by gross domestic product (PPP) per capita in April 2022 (from Economics)
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In the news
- 20 November 2024 – German economic crisis
- American automaker Ford announces that it will cut 4,000 jobs in Europe, including 2,900 in Germany, citing economic instability and conflicts with environmental regulations. (Newsweek)
- 29 October 2024 – German economic crisis
- German metalworkers union IG Metall begins a labor strike over the working conditions and wages of 3.9 million workers in the country. (DW)
- 23 October 2024 – Russian invasion of Ukraine
- The U.S. Defense Department finalizes a US$20 billion loan to Ukraine for military and economic support as part of a collective US$50 billion loan between G7 members. (Reuters)
- 23 October 2024 – Demographics of Germany, German economic crisis
- The Ifo Institute for Economic Research reports that Germany experienced a 13% birth rate decline nationally and up to a 17.5% birth rate decline in eastern Germany between 2021 and 2023, with the institute attributing the decline to several reasons including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and high inflation. (DW)
- 14 October 2024 – Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
- This year's Nobel Prize in economics is awarded to Turkish-American economist Daron Acemoglu, British-American economist Simon Johnson, and British economist James A. Robinson for their studies "of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity". (The New York Times) (Nobel Prize)
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