- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
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A crucial ingredient of economic growth. Economists often used to take a certain rate of technological progress for granted, but in new endogenous growth theory they make more effort to measure accurately and better understand what causes differences in the rate of technical change.
Industry:Economy
The weighted average of a country’s export prices relative to its import prices.
Industry:Economy
An economic philosophy espoused by some leftish political leaders in the late 20th century, including Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. According to the rhetoric, it is not capitalism and not socialism, but a third (pragmatic) way. Many have therefore found it rather hard to pin down. It was earlier used to describe Sweden’s economic model.
Industry:Economy
The fast-growing developing economies of Asia, at least before their crisis in the late 1990s.
Industry:Economy
Several measurements of a variable taken at regular intervals, such as daily, monthly, quarterly, and so on. They are often used by economists in search of trends that they hope will let them predict future movements in the variable.
Industry:Economy
The idea that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future, because the dollar in the hand today can earn interest during the time until the future dollar is received.
Industry:Economy
The sum of all the different benefits from investing in an asset, including income paid to the investor and any change in the market value of the asset. The total return is often expressed as a percentage of the amount invested.
Industry:Economy
In a globalizing economy, it is perhaps surprising that countries increasingly trade with their nearest neighbors. One explanation is geography: as countries have lowered their tariff barriers, the relatively greater importance of transport costs makes proximity matter more. According to new trade theory, this also produces gains from economies of scale. But another reason for the fast growth in trade among nearby countries may be less benign. The proliferation of regional trade agreements may be causing neighbors to trade with each other when it would be more efficient for them to export to and import from afar. In the past 50 years more than 150 regional trade agreements have been notified to the general agreement on tariffs and trade (GATT) or the world trade organization (WTO), most of which are still in force. Roughly half of these, including some revisions of previous deals, have been set up since 1990. The best-known are the European union, the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Mercosur in South America. There are dozens of other examples. Economists have generally been unenthusiastic about regionalism, for two reasons. First, they worry that preferential tariffs will cause trade to flow in inefficient ways, a process known as trade diversion. In a perfect world, trade patterns should be determined by comparative advantage: the comparative cost of making different goods yourself as opposed to buying them from various countries. If the United States imports Mexican televisions merely because the Mexican goods are tariff-free, even if Malaysia has a comparative advantage in television manufacturing, the main benefit of trade will be lost. The second concern is that regionalism will impede efforts to liberalize trade throughout the world. One prominent critic, Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist at Columbia University in New York, has famously said that regional trade areas are “stumbling blocks” rather than “building blocks” in the freeing of global trade. There is no clear-cut theoretical answer to the question of whether regional trade agreements are good or bad, and the empirical findings are hotly disputed. In general, though, it seems likely that it is better to have regional groups that are open to the rest of the world than groups that are closed.
Industry:Economy
An excess of imports over exports is a trade deficit. An excess of exports over imports is a trade surplus. (See balance of payments. )
Industry:Economy
