- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
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Mathematics and sophisticated computing applied to economics. Econometricians crunch data in search of economic relationships that have statistical significance. Sometimes this is done to test a theory; at other times the computers churn the numbers until they come up with an interesting result. Some economists are fierce critics of theory-free econometrics.
Industry:Economy
Government policies intended to smooth the economic cycle, expanding demand when unemployment is high and reducing it when inflation threatens to increase. Doing this by fine tuning has mostly proved harder than Keynesian policymakers expected, and it has become unfashionable. However, the use of automatic stabilizers remains widespread. For instance, social handouts from the state usually increase during tough times, and taxes increase (fiscal drag), boosting government revenue, when the economy is growing.
Industry:Economy
Makes the world go round and comes in many forms, from shells and beads to gold coins to plastic or paper. It is better than barter in enabling an economy’s scarce resources to be allocated efficiently. Money has three main qualities:
* as a medium of exchange, buyers can give it to sellers to pay for goods and services;
* as a unit of account, it can be used to add up apples and oranges in some common value;
* as a store of value, it can be used to transfer purchasing power into the future. A farmer who exchanges fruit for money can spend that money in the future; if he holds on to his fruit it might rot and no longer be useful for paying for something. Inflation undermines the usefulness of money as a store of value, in particular, and also as a unit of account for comparing values at different points in time. Hyper-inflation may destroy confidence in a particular form of money even as a medium of exchange. Measures of liquidity describe how easily an asset can be exchanged for money (the easier this is, the more liquid is the asset).
Industry:Economy
Selling something for less than the cost of producing it. This may be used by a dominant firm to attack rivals, a strategy known to antitrust authorities as predatory pricing. Participants in international trade are often accused of dumping by domestic firms charging more than rival imports. Countries can slap duties on cheap imports that they judge are being dumped in their markets. Often this amounts to thinly disguised protectionism against more efficient foreign firms. In practice, genuine predatory pricing is rare – certainly much rarer than anti-dumping actions – because it relies on the unlikely ability of a single producer to dominate a world market. In any case, consumers gain from lower prices; so do companies that can buy their supplies more cheaply abroad.
Industry:Economy
Term coined in the 1970s for the twin economic problems of stagnation and rising inflation. Until then, these two economic blights had not appeared simultaneously. Indeed, policymakers believed the message of the Phillips curve: that unemployment and inflation were alternatives.
Industry:Economy
Using private firms to carry out aspects of government. This has become increasingly popular since the early 1980s as governments have tried to obtain some of the benefits of the private sector without going as far as full privatization. The gains have been greatest when services have been allocated to private firms through competitive bidding. They have been smallest, and arguably even negative, in cases when the main contribution of the private firm has been to raise finance. That is because governments can usually borrow more cheaply than private firms, so when they ask them to raise money the question that springs to mind is: are they doing this to make their public borrowing look smaller?
Industry:Economy
What a central bank does to control the money supply, and thereby manage demand. Monetary policy involves open-market operations, reserve requirements and changing the short-term rate of interest (the discount rate). It is one of the two main tools of macroeconomic policy, the side-kick of fiscal policy, and is easier said than done well. (See monetarism. )
Industry:Economy
A firm with the ability to set prices in its market (see monopoly, oligopoly and antitrust).
Industry:Economy
A method for calculating the correct value of a currency, which may differ from its current market value. It is helpful when comparing living standards in different countries, as it indicates the appropriate exchange rate to use when expressing incomes and prices in different countries in a common currency. By correct value, economists mean the exchange rate that would bring demand and supply of a currency into equilibrium over the long-term. The current market rate is only a short-run equilibrium. Purchasing power parity (PPP) says that goods and services should cost the same in all countries when measured in a common currency. PPP is the exchange rate that equates the price of a basket of identical traded goods and services in two countries. PPP is often very different from the current market exchange rate. Some economists argue that once the exchange rate is pushed away from its PPP, trade and financial flows in and out of a country can move into disequilibrium, resulting in potentially substantial trade and current account deficits or surpluses. Because it is not just traded goods that are affected, some economists argue that PPP is too narrow a measure for judging a currency’s true value. They prefer the fundamental equilibrium exchange rate (FEER), which is the rate consistent with a country achieving an overall balance with the outside world, including both traded goods and services and capital flows. (See Big Mac index. )
Industry:Economy
