Economics

Definition of 'Economics'

A social science that studies how individuals, governments, firms and nations make choices on allocating scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants. Economics can generally be broken down into: macroeconomics, which concentrates on the behavior of the aggregate economy; and microeconomics, which focuses on individual consumers.
Economics is often referred to as "the dismal science."

General Characteristics

Economics studies human welfare in terms of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. While there is a considerable body of ancient and medieval thought on economic questions, the discipline of political economy only took shape in the early modern period. Some prominent schools of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Cameralism (Germany), Mercantilism (Britain), and Physiocracy (France). Classical political economy, launched by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), dominated the discipline for more than one hundred years. American economics drew on all of these sources, but it did not forge its own identity until the end of the nineteenth century, and it did not attain its current global hegemony until after World War II. This was as much due to the sheer number of active economists as to the brilliance of Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, and Kenneth Arrow, among others. Prior to 1900, the American community of economists had largely been perceived, both from within and from abroad, as a relative backwater. The United States did not produce a theorist to rival the likes of Adam Smith (1723–1790), David Ricardo (1772–1823), or Karl Marx (1818–1883).


Several factors in American economic and intellectual history help explain this fact. First, the presence of a large slave economy before the Civil War resulted in a concentrated effort to weigh the arguments for and against free labor. The landmark study in American economic history of the last century, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross (1974), speaks to this unfortunate legacy. Second, the belated onset of industrialization (in 1860, 80 percent of the population was still rural), and the founding of many land-grant colleges with the Morrill Act of 1862 resulted in the emergence of a field of specialization that endures to this day: agricultural or land economics. Even in the interwar years, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics was a major center of research in the field. Third, American federalism, by decentralizing the management of money and credit, had direct and arguably dire consequences for the development of banking and capital accumulation. Persistent debates on the merits of paper currency can be traced from the latter half of the eighteenth century right up to 1971, when American fiat money replaced the gold standard once and for all.

Economic Survey

economic survey tells us the drastic pictures of the economy.econmoic survey has a complete information about past , present and future, of the economy. if we plan with better management we can take the goal of economic growth otherwise we will face a worse condition.

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