- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
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A process for exploring how a portfolio of assets and/or liabilities would fare in extreme adverse conditions. A useful tool in risk management.
Industry:Economy
The study of the individual pieces that together make an economy. Contrast with macroeconomics, the study of economy-wide phenomena such as growth, inflation and unemployment. Microeconomics considers issues such as how households reach decisions about consumption and saving, how firms set a price for their output, whether privatization improves efficiency, whether a particular market has enough competition in it and how the market for labor works.
Industry:Economy
Taxes levied on the income or wealth of an individual or company. Contrast with indirect taxation. In much of the world, direct tax rates fell during the 1980s and 1990s, partly because some economists argued that high rates of tax on income discouraged people from working, and that high rates of tax on profit encouraged companies to move to countries with lower rates. Furthermore, high rates of income tax were viewed as politically unpopular. Even so, although rates were cut, because both personal income and corporate profits grew steadily throughout this period the total amount collected via direct taxation continued to rise. Economists often disagree about which of direct taxes or indirect taxes are the least inefficient method of taxation.
Industry:Economy
A program of policies designed to change the structure of an economy. Usually, the term refers to adjustment towards a market economy, under a program approved by the IMF and/or World Bank, which often supply structural adjustment funds to ease the pain of transition. Such policies are much criticized in the developing world, sometimes with good reason.
Industry:Economy
When two businesses join together, either by merging or by one company taking over the other. There are three sorts of mergers between firms: horizontal integration, in which two similar firms tie the knot; vertical integration, in which two firms at different stages in the supply chain get together; and diversification, when two companies with nothing in common jump into bed. These can be a voluntary marriage of equals; a voluntary takeover of one firm by another; or a hostile takeover, in which the management of the target firm resists the advances of the buyer but is eventually forced to accept a deal by its current owners. For reasons that are not at all clear, merger activity generally happens in waves. One possible explanation is that when share prices are low, many firms have a market capitalization that is low relative to the value of their assets. This makes them attractive to buyers (see tobin). In theory, the different sorts of mergers have different sorts of potential benefits. However, the damning lesson of merger waves stretching back over the past 50 years is that, with one big ex ception – the spate of leveraged buy-outs in the United States during the 1980s – they have often failed to deliver benefits that justify the costs.
Industry:Economy
The more you have, the smaller is the extra benefit you get from having even more; also known as diseconomies of scale (see economies of scale). For instance, when workers have a lot of capital giving them a little more may not increase their productivity anywhere near as much as would giving the same amount to workers who currently have little or no capital. This underpins the catch-up effect, whereby there is (supposedly) convergence between the rates of growth of developing countries and developed ones. In the new economy, some economists argue, capital may not suffer from diminishing returns, or at least the amount of diminishing will be much smaller. There may even be ever increasing returns.
Industry:Economy
The hardest sort of unemployment to cure because it is caused by the structure of an economy rather than by changes in the economic cycle. Contrast with cyclical unemployment, which can, in theory if not always in practice, be cut without sparking inflation by stimulating faster economic growth. Structural unemployment can be reduced only by changing the economic structures causing it, for instance, by removing rules that limit labor market flexibility.
Industry:Economy
The conventional economic wisdom of the 17th century that made a partial come-back in recent years. Mercantilists feared that money would become too scarce to sustain high levels of output and employment; their favored solution was cheap money (low interest rates). In a forerunner to the 20th-century debate between Keynesians and monetarists, they were opposed by advocates of classical economics, who argued that cheap and plentiful money could result in inflation. The original mercantilists, such as John Law, a Scots financier (and convicted murderer), believed that a country’s economic prosperity and political power came from its stocks of precious metals. To maximize these stocks they argued against free trade, favoring protectionist policies designed to minimize imports and maximize exports, creating a trade surplus that could be used to acquire more precious metal. This was contested for the classicists by Adam Smith and David Hume, who argued that a country’s wealth came not from its stock of precious metals but rather from its stocks of productive resources (land, labor, capital, and so on) and how efficiently they are used. Free trade increased efficiency by allowing countries to specialize in things in which they have a comparative advantage.
Industry:Economy
Spawned by the end of the colonial era in the 1950s and 1960s, a whole branch of economic theory grew up around the question of how to promote economic development in poor countries. The proposition on which development economics was built was that poor countries were intrinsically different from rich ones and so needed their own set of economic models. Some development economists argued, for instance, that the self-interested, rational individual (homo economicus) did not exist in traditional tribal societies. They claimed that because many poor countries had large agricultural populations and were often dependent on a few commodity exports for foreign exchange earnings, economic policies that suited rich countries would not work for them. With hindsight, much of this was misguided, and policies based on it had disastrous effects. Development economists believed that the state had to play a big role in fostering modernization. Instead, the result was huge, inefficient ¬bureaucracies riddled with corruption, massive budget deficits and rampant inflation. During the 1990s, most governments of developing countries started to reverse these policies and undo the damage they had done by introducing policies based on similar economic models to those that had worked in rich countries. However, the sequencing of these new policies seemed to make a big difference to how well they worked. Doing the right things in the right order is crucial.
Industry:Economy
Money paid, usually by government, to keep prices below what they would be in a free market, or to keep alive businesses that would otherwise go bust, or to make activities happen that otherwise would not take place. Subsidies can be a form of protectionism by making domestic goods and services artificially competitive against imports. By distorting markets, they can impose large economic costs.
Industry:Economy
