Analytic pressure-volume diagrams are utilized to illustrate the effects of gasoline engine design on performance and combustion requirements.
Major expenses in building are for land, materials, and labour. In each case they are high when the commodity is scarce and low when it is abundant, and they influence planning more directly when they become restrictive. Definition No one has ever succeeded in neatly defining the scope of economics.
Perhaps the only foolproof definition is that attributed to Canadian-born economist Jacob Viner: Difficult as it may be to define economics, it is not difficult to indicate the sorts of questions that concern economists.
Among other things, they seek to analyze the forces determining prices —not only the prices of goods and services but the prices of the resources used to produce them. This involves the discovery of two key elements: These questions are representative of microeconomicsthe part of economics that deals with the behaviour of individual entities such as consumers, business firms, traders, and farmers.
The other major branch of economics is macroeconomicswhich focuses attention on aggregates such as the level of income in the whole economy, the volume of total employment, the flow of total investmentand so forth.
Here economists are concerned with the forces determining the income of a country or the level of total investment, and they seek to learn why full employment is so rarely attained and what public policies might help a country achieve higher employment or greater price stability.
But these examples still do not exhaust the range of problems that economists consider. There is also the important field of development economicswhich examines the attitudes and institutions supporting the process of economic development in poor countries as well as those capable of self-sustained economic growth for example, development economics was at the heart of the Marshall Plan.
In this field the economist is concerned with the extent to which the factors affecting economic development can be manipulated by public policy. Cutting across these major divisions in economics are the specialized fields of public financemoney and bankinginternational tradelabour economicsagricultural economicsindustrial organization, and others.
Economists are frequently consulted to assess the effects of governmental measures such as taxationminimum-wage laws, rent controls, tariffschanges in interest rates, changes in government budgetsand so on. Historical development of economics The effective birth of economics as a separate discipline may be traced to the yearwhen the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
There was, of course, economics before Smith: The unintended effects of markets The Wealth of Nations, as its title suggests, is essentially a book about economic development and the policies that can either promote or hinder it.
In its practical aspects the book is an attack on the protectionist doctrines of the mercantilists and a brief for the merits of free trade. That is, each person takes prices as they come and is free only to vary the quantities bought and sold at the given prices.
But this is true only if the competitive system is embedded in an appropriate legal and institutional framework—an insight that Smith developed at length but that was largely overlooked by later generations. Their imperfections notwithstanding, these theories became the building blocks of classical and modern economics.
This book acted, in one sense, as a critical commentary on the Wealth of Nations.
Ricardo invented the concept of the economic model —a tightly knit logical apparatus consisting of a few strategic variables—that was capable of yielding, after some manipulation and the addition of a few empirically observable extras, results of enormous practical import. At the heart of the Ricardian system is the notion that economic growth must sooner or later be arrested because of the rising cost of cultivating food on a limited land area.
Although wages are held down, profits do not rise proportionately, because tenant farmers outbid each other for superior land. As land prices were increasing, Malthus concluded, the chief beneficiaries of economic progress were the landowners.
Since the root of the problem, according to Ricardo, was the declining yield i. He assumed that within a given country labour and capital are free to move in search of the highest returns but that between countries they are not.
Ricardo showed that the benefits of international trade are determined by a comparison of costs within each country rather than by a comparison of costs between countries. International trade will profit a country that specializes in the production of the goods it can produce relatively more efficiently the same country would import everything else.
For example, India might be able to produce everything more efficiently than England, but India might profit most by concentrating its resources on textiles, in which its efficiency is relatively greater than in other areas of Indian production, and by importing British capital goods.
The beauty of the argument is that if all countries take full advantage of this territorial division of labourtotal world output is certain to be physically larger than it will be if some or all countries try to become self-sufficient.
As a result, many of the late 19th-century economists devoted their efforts to the problem of how resources are allocated under conditions of perfect competition. Marxism Before proceeding, it is important to discuss the last of the classical economists, Karl Marx. The first volume of his work Das Kapital appeared in ; after his death the second and third volumes were published in andrespectively.
To say that one is a Marxian economist is, in effect, to share the value judgment that it is socially undesirable for some people in the community to derive their income merely from the ownership of property. Since few professional economists in the 19th century accepted this ethical postulate and most were indeed inclined to find some social justification for the existence of private property and the income derived from it, Marxian economics failed to win resounding acceptance among professional economists.
The Marxian approach, moreover, culminated in three generalizations about capitalism: In addition, Marxian economics had little to say on the practical problems that are the bread and butter of economists in any society, such as the effect of taxes on specific commodities or that of a rise in the rate of interest on the level of total investment.
The marginalists The next major development in economic theory, the marginal revolution, stemmed essentially from the work of three men: See utility and value.
Indeed, it was the consistent application of marginalism that marked the true dividing line between classical theory and modern economics.
The classical economists identified the major economic problem as predicting the effects of changes in the quantity of capital and labour on the rate of growth of national output.Comprehensive and meticulously documented facts about taxes. Learn about the various types of taxes, the distribution of the tax burden, economic effects, hidden taxes, and more.
Aug 13, · Economics Prof. Sayour April 16, The Effects of Minimum Wage The main focuses of this article is the effects minimum wage has on all aspects of the economy in a microeconomics perspective. Microeconomics tells us that it is far more efficient to abolish the minimum wage and address poverty directly through the earned income tax credit or wage subsidies.
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Now suppose the government imposes a minimum wage of $5 per hour; it is illegal for firms to pay less. At this minimum wage, L1units of labor are ashio-midori.com obtain any smaller quantity of labor, the firm must pay the minimum wage. Jun 09, · BEO MICROECONOMIC ANALYSIS TUTORIAL QUESTIONS TOPIC 1 Question 1 (a) Discuss how microeconomic theory can help to explain the effects of lowering the minimum wage for teenage employees in the retail industry (b) How is the usefulness of a theory evaluated (c) “Observation without theory and theory without observation are equally.