Economics
Economies, markets and finance
Articles in this category are re-verified roughly every 30 days.
Economics
Behavioral economics
Behavioral economics combines economic analysis with evidence about how people actually make choices. It studies how attention, beliefs, emotions, social preferences and limits on self-control can shape decisions, and how these patterns affect markets and public policy. Rather than treating every choice as irrational, the field tests when psychological factors matter and how strongly their effects depend on context.
Updated 15 Oct 2026
Economics
Bretton Woods system
The Bretton Woods system was the post–Second World War international monetary order designed at a 1944 conference in New Hampshire. Participating countries tied their currencies to the U.S. dollar, which the United States valued at a fixed gold price. The system aimed to promote exchange-rate stability and international economic cooperation; it broke down between 1971 and 1973 after the United States suspended dollar–gold convertibility and countries moved toward floating exchange rates.
Updated 21 Oct 2026
Economics
Capitalism
Capitalism is a family of economic systems in which productive assets are largely privately owned and markets, wage labor, and investment for profit play substantial roles. There is no universally agreed boundary for the term, and actual capitalist economies differ widely in how private markets interact with governments, workers, and public services.
Updated 18 Oct 2026
Economics
Carbon pricing
Carbon pricing is a family of public policies that attach a monetary cost to greenhouse-gas emissions, principally through carbon taxes and emissions trading systems. By changing the relative costs of emitting and lower-emission activities, it can influence production and investment, but its effects depend on how the policy is designed, which emissions it covers, and how households and businesses are affected.
Updated 16 Oct 2026
Economics
Central bank
A central bank is a public monetary authority responsible for key parts of a country’s or currency area’s financial system. Its work commonly includes monetary policy, which influences interest rates and financial conditions to pursue goals such as price stability. Depending on its legal mandate, a central bank may also oversee financial institutions, support payment systems, issue currency or provide emergency liquidity to banks.
Updated 13 Oct 2026
Economics
Comparative advantage
Comparative advantage is the economic principle that people, firms or countries can gain from specialization and exchange by producing goods or services at a lower opportunity cost than others. Unlike absolute advantage, it compares what must be given up, not simply how much can be produced. The principle helps explain trade, but it does not imply that trade's gains are shared equally.
Updated 16 Oct 2026
Economics
Cooperatives
A cooperative is an enterprise jointly owned and democratically controlled by people who unite to meet shared needs. Its members may be workers, producers, consumers or other stakeholders; they govern the organization and share in its benefits under rules that vary by cooperative type and national law.
Updated 16 Oct 2026
Economics
Double-entry bookkeeping
Double-entry bookkeeping is a system for recording financial transactions in which each journal entry affects at least two accounts and total debits equal total credits. By organizing transactions in journals and account ledgers, it supports checks on financial records and the preparation of statements about an organization's financial position and performance. Its development is associated with Italian merchants; Luca Pacioli's 1494 work printed an influential early explanation but did not invent the practice.
Updated 19 Oct 2026
Economics
Economy of India
India's economy combines agriculture, a varied industrial base and a large services sector linked to domestic demand and international trade. Recent growth has been supported by household consumption, investment and services, while development remains uneven and the labour market, productivity and climate exposure pose continuing challenges.
Updated 12 Oct 2026
Economics
Externality
In economics, an externality is a cost or benefit from an activity that affects people outside the transaction and is not fully reflected in the decisions of those involved. Pollution is a common negative example; knowledge shared through research and development can be a positive one. Because private costs or returns may differ from their effects on society, externalities can lead to inefficient outcomes and are addressed through a range of private and public measures.
Updated 20 Oct 2026
Economics
Gini coefficient
The Gini coefficient, also called the Gini index, summarizes inequality in a distribution, most often the distribution of income or consumption within a population. It is calculated from the Lorenz curve by comparing the observed distribution with a hypothetical line of perfect equality. On the usual normalized scale for nonnegative values, 0 represents equality and 1 (or 100 when expressed as a percentage) represents the maximum possible concentration. The measure is widely used in economic analysis, but a single Gini value cannot describe every feature of a distribution or, by itself, indicate poverty or living standards.
Updated 15 Oct 2026
Economics
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe international economic crisis that began in 1929 and affected countries differently through the 1930s and into the early 1940s. A downturn that started in the United States spread through banking and trade links, while falling demand, financial panics and monetary contraction deepened the slump. It caused widespread unemployment and hardship and reshaped economic policy.
Updated 15 Oct 2026
Economics
Gresham's law
Gresham's law is a monetary principle commonly summarized as “bad money drives out good.” In its classic form, when two coins with different intrinsic metal values must be accepted at the same legal value, people tend to spend the less valuable coin and hold, export or melt the more valuable one. The outcome depends on these institutional conditions; economists have debated how far the slogan applies beyond them.
Updated 23 Oct 2026
Economics
Gross domestic product
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the monetary value of final goods and services produced within an economy’s territory during a specified period. It is a core measure of economic output, estimated through production, expenditure, or income accounts. Real GDP adjusts for price changes to show changes in output volume, but GDP alone does not describe how income is distributed or whether people’s overall well-being is improving.
Updated 12 Oct 2026
Economics
Inflation
Inflation is a sustained increase in the general level of prices over time, so a unit of money buys less on average than before. It is measured with price indexes that track selected baskets of goods and services, not by the change in any single price. Inflation can arise from interacting pressures on demand, production costs, supply and expectations; its effects differ across households and businesses, depending on how prices, wages, incomes and contracts change.
Updated 13 Oct 2026
Economics
Microfinance
Microfinance refers to financial services designed for low-income and socially marginalized people who have historically been excluded from formal financial systems. It is broader than microcredit, which means small loans, and may include services such as savings, insurance and payments. Evidence shows that access can be useful, but it does not automatically reduce poverty: outcomes vary with borrowers' circumstances, product design, market conditions and consumer protections.
Updated 14 Oct 2026
Economics
Minimum Wage
A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers may legally pay covered workers for a specified period of work. Countries set and adjust these wage floors in different ways, balancing workers’ needs with economic conditions. Research finds that minimum wages can raise pay for affected workers, while employment and broader income effects vary across policies and labour markets.
Updated 17 Oct 2026
Economics
Opportunity cost
In economics, opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative forgone when a choice is made. It expresses trade-offs created by limited time, money, labour, capital and other resources, including alternatives that do not involve a direct payment. The concept helps compare choices by individuals, firms and societies, but its value can be difficult to estimate when the benefits of alternatives are uncertain or non-monetary.
Updated 14 Oct 2026
Economics
Phillips curve
The Phillips curve is a macroeconomic framework linking inflation—or, in its original formulation, wage growth—to unemployment and other measures of labour-market slack. A. W. Phillips’s 1958 study found an inverse association between UK unemployment and money-wage inflation over 1861–1957. Later theory incorporated inflation expectations and the equilibrium rate of unemployment, showing why the relationship is not a permanent, fixed trade-off. Economists and central banks continue to use and test Phillips-curve models, whose strength can vary across periods and conditions.
Updated 17 Oct 2026
Economics
Public goods
In economics, public goods are goods or services characterized by non-excludability and non-rivalry: people cannot readily be kept from benefiting, and one person's use does not substantially reduce what is available to others. These features can make it difficult to charge beneficiaries and coordinate provision. The category is defined by a good's properties, not simply by whether government supplies or pays for it, and real-world cases can change with technology, rules and congestion.
Updated 19 Oct 2026
Economics
Purchasing power parity
Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a way of comparing currencies by asking how much each buys in its own country: a PPP conversion rate aims to equalize the prices of comparable goods and services across economies. International statistical programs use PPPs to compare economic output and price levels, especially when market exchange rates would not reflect domestic purchasing power. A PPP rate is a statistical comparison, not the rate at which currency can be exchanged in financial markets.
Updated 21 Oct 2026
Economics
Remittances
Remittances are financial or in-kind transfers associated with migration, commonly sent by migrants to relatives or communities in their places of origin. They provide private income across borders and can support household needs and rural livelihoods, but their effects depend on local circumstances and access to safe, affordable services. Official statistics use technical definitions and cannot capture every transfer, so published totals are estimates rather than a complete count of all money or goods sent.
Updated 18 Oct 2026
Economics
Supply and demand
Supply and demand is a basic microeconomic framework for analyzing how the amounts buyers are willing and able to purchase and producers are willing and able to sell interact at different prices. In a simplified competitive market, their intersection identifies an equilibrium price and quantity. Changes in costs, preferences, income, technology, and other conditions can shift the curves, while real-world institutions and simultaneous shocks influence how markets respond.
Updated 13 Oct 2026
Economics
Tragedy of the commons
The tragedy of the commons is a model of how people using a shared, finite resource can have incentives to overuse it: each user gains from additional use while sharing the resulting costs with others. Garrett Hardin popularized the phrase in a 1968 essay about resource depletion. It is a framework for analysing collective-action problems, not a rule that shared resources inevitably fail. Research by Elinor Ostrom and others documents communities that have governed common-pool resources through locally developed rules.
Updated 21 Oct 2026
Economics
Tulip Mania
Tulip mania, also called tulipomania, refers to the intense Dutch trade in tulip bulbs in the 1630s, especially the rise and fall of prices for some varieties in 1636–1637. Historians debate how closely the episode fits the popular story of a nationwide speculative bubble and economic collapse.
Updated 1 Nov 2026
Economics
Unemployment
Unemployment is a labour-market condition in which people without work meet defined criteria for availability and job search. The unemployment rate is the number of unemployed people as a share of the labour force, not the entire population. Economists distinguish cyclical, structural and frictional unemployment, although these causes can overlap. The headline rate does not capture everyone who wants more or different work, so it is read alongside other labour-market measures.
Updated 14 Oct 2026