- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
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This usually refers to firms, where it is defined as the value of the firm’s output minus the value of all its inputs purchased from other firms. It is therefore a measure of the profit earned by a particular firm plus the wages it has paid. As a rule, the more value a firm can add to a product, the more successful it will be. In many countries, the main form of indirect taxation is value-added tax, which is levied on the value created at each stage of production. However, it is paid, ultimately, by whoever consumes the finished product. Another definition of value added refers to the change in the overall economic value of a company. This takes into account changes in the combined value of its shares, assets, debt and other liabilities. Part of the pay of company bosses is often linked to how much economic value is added to the company under their management.
Industry:Economy
Part of a firm’s production costs that changes according to how much output it produces. Contrast with fixed costs. Examples include some purchases of raw materials and workers’ overtime payments. In the long run, most costs can be varied.
Industry:Economy
Physical exports and imports, such as coal, computer chips and cars. Also known as merchandise trade. Contrast with invisible trade. (See balance of payments. )
Industry:Economy
The most widely accepted measure of risk in financial markets is the amount by which the price of a security swings up and down. The more volatile the price, the riskier is the security. Not least because there is no obvious alternative, economists often use past volatility to forecast the future risk of a security. However, as the saying goes, past results are not necessarily guides to future performance.
Industry:Economy
Unemployment through opting not to work, even though there are jobs available. This is the joblessness that remains when there is otherwise full employment. It includes frictional unemployment as a result of people changing jobs, people not working while they undertake job search and ¬people who just do not want to work.
Industry:Economy
The price of labor. In theory, wages ought to change so that the supply and demand in the labor market are always in equilibrium. In practice, wages are often sticky, especially in a downward direction: when demand for labor falls, wages do not fall. In this situation, the fall in demand results in higher involuntary unemployment. Trade unions may use collective bargaining to keep wages above the market-clearing rate. Furthermore, many governments impose a minimum wage that employers must pay. Firms may choose to pay above the equilibrium wage to increase the productivity of workers. Such so-called efficiency wages may make workers less likely to join another firm, so cutting the employer’s hiring and training costs. They may encourage workers to do a better job. They may also attract a higher quality of worker than wages at the market-clearing rate; better workers may have a higher reservation wage (the lowest wage for which they are willing to work) than the market-clearing equilibrium. In recent years, employers have tried to reduce wage stickiness by increasing the proportion of pay that is linked to the performance of their firm. Thus if falling demand reduces the employer’s profit the pay of its employees falls automatically, so it does not have to lay off as many workers as it otherwise would. Performance-related wages can also reduce agency costs by giving hired hands a stronger incentive to do a good job.
Industry:Economy
An institution created with the IMF at Bretton Woods in 1944 and opened in 1946. The World Bank has three main branches: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Agency (IDA) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Collectively, it aims to promote economic development in the world’s poorer countries through advice and long-term lending, averaging $30 ¬billion a year, spread around 100 countries. Critics of the World Bank say that it often worsens the problems facing developing countries. Its advice has often been guided by economic fashion, which led it to support a centrally planned brand of development economics in the 1960s and 1970s, before switching to privatization and structural adjustment in the 1980s and then to promoting democracy and economic transparency, and attacking crony capitalism, in the late 1990s. Until recently, it has generally supported big, ¬high-profile projects rather than more economically useful smaller schemes. It has often failed to ensure that its loans have been spent on the intended project. Its willingness to pump money into struggling countries creates a potential moral hazard, in which politicians may have little incentive to govern well because they believe that, if they do a bad job, the World Bank will come to the rescue. The increase in private-sector lending to and investment in emerging markets has led to growing discussion of whether the World Bank is any longer needed.
Industry:Economy
Bête noire of anti-globalization protesters. The World Trade Organization is the governing body of international trade, setting and enforcing the rules of trade and punishing offenders. Established during the Uruguay Round of talks under the general agreement on tariffs and trade (GATT), it opened for business in 1995 with a membership of 132 countries (rising to 146 by 2003). Countries used to break GATT rules with impunity. They seem to be finding it harder to do so under the WTO. Even so, protestors complain that it does not promote fair trade but does promote the interest of rich countries over poorer one. Supporters of free trade, including The Economist, reckon that all countries are better off as part of a well-regulated international trading system, and that the WTO is the most likely source of the good regulation that is needed.
Industry:Economy
A tax that takes a smaller proportion of income as the taxpayer’s income rises, for example, a fixed-rate vehicle tax that eats up a much larger slice of a poor person’s income than a rich person’s income. This goes against the principle of vertical equity, which many people think should be at the heart of any fair tax system.
Industry:Economy
Americans use welfare as shorthand for government handouts to the poor. Economists use it to describe the well being of an individual or society, as in “Are tax cuts welfare-enhancing?”. This is economist-speak for “Will tax cuts improve the overall well being of the country?” (See utility. )
Industry:Economy
