Moral Hazard is the concept that individuals have incentives to alter their behaviour when their risk or bad-decision making is borne by others. Examples of moral hazard include: Comprehensive insurance policies decrease the incentive to take care of your possessions Governments promising to bail out loss-making banks can encourage banks to take greater risks. Conditions …
The short run, long run and very long run are different time periods in economics. Quick definition Very short run – where all factors of production are fixed. (e.g on one particular day, a firm cannot employ more workers or buy more products to sell) Short run – where one factor of production (e.g. capital) …
The fiscal multiplier effect occurs when an initial injection into the economy causes a bigger final increase in national income. For example, if the government increased spending by £1 billion but this caused real GDP to increase by a total of £1.7 billion, then the multiplier would have a value of 1.7. Example of how …
A key economic debate is the extent to which should governments intervene in the economy? At one extreme, free-market economists/libertarians, argue that government intervention should be limited to all but the most basic services, such as the protection of private property and the maintenance of law and order. At the other extreme, Marxist economists argue …
Supply-side policies are government attempts to increase productivity and increase efficiency in the economy. If successful, they will shift aggregate supply (AS) to the right and enable higher economic growth in the long-run. There are two main types of supply-side policies. Free-market supply-side policies involve policies to increase competitiveness and free-market efficiency. For example, privatisation, …
A look at some different topics related to the economics of food. Will a rise in population lead to a shortage of food? I think most people have heard of The Dismal Prophecy of Malthus. (though Economics was termed the ‘dismal science’ for different reasons) Writing in the late eighteenth century, T.Malthus argued that the …
Comparative Advantage. A country has a comparative advantage if it can produce a good at a lower opportunity cost than another country. A lower opportunity cost means it has to forego less of other goods in order to produce it. Example of Output of two goods Textiles Books UK 1 4 India 2 3 Total …
Definition of Monopoly A pure monopoly is defined as a single seller of a product, i.e. 100% of market share. In the UK a firm is said to have monopoly power if it has more than 25% of the market share. For example, Tesco @30% market share or Google 90% of search engine traffic. Monopoly …