- Industrie: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
An economy that does not take part in inter¬national trade; the opposite of an open economy. At the turn of the century about the only notable example left of a closed economy is North Korea (see autarky).
Industry:Economy
The dominant theory of economics from the 18th century to the 20th century, when it evolved into Neo-classical economics. Classical economists, who included Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, believed that the pursuit of individual self-interest produced the greatest possible economic benefits for society as a whole through the power of the invisible hand. They also believed that an economy is always in equilibrium or moving towards it. Equilibrium was ensured in the labor market by movements in wages and in the capital market by changes in the rate of interest. The interest rate ensured that total savings in an economy were equal to total investment. In disequilibrium, higher interest rates encouraged more saving and less investment, and lower rates meant less saving and more investment. When the demand for labor rose or fell, wages would also rise or fall to keep the workforce at full employment. In the 1920s and 1930s, John Maynard Keynes attacked some of the main beliefs of classical and neo-classical economics, which became unfashionable. In particular, he argued that the rate of interest was determined or influenced by the speculative actions of investors in bonds and that wages were inflexible downwards, so that if demand for labor fell, the result would be higher unemployment rather than cheaper workers.
Industry:Economy
A fervently free-market economic philosophy long associated with the University of Chicago. At times, especially when Keynesian economics was the orthodoxy in much of the world, the Chicago School was regarded as a bastion of unworldly extremism. However, from the late 1970s it came to be regarded as mainstream by many and Chicago trained economists often played a crucial part in the implementation of policies of low inflation and market liberalization that swept the world during the 1980s and 1990s. By 2003, boasted the University of Chicago, some 22 of the 49 then winners of the Nobel Prize for economics had been faculty members, students or researchers there.
Industry:Economy
“Bah! Humbug”, was Scrooge’s opinion of charitable giving. Some economists reckon charity goes against economic rationality. Some have argued that the popularity of charitable giving is proof that people are not economically rational. Others argue that it shows that altruism is something that people get pleasure (utility) from, and so are willing to spend some of their income on it. An interesting question is the extent to which the state is competing with private charity when it redistributes money from rich to poor or spends more on health care and whether this is inefficient.
Industry:Economy
A guardian of the monetary system. A central bank sets short-term interest rates and oversees the health of the financial system, including by acting as lender of last resort to commercial banks that get into financial difficulties. The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, was founded in 1913. The Bank of England, known affectionately as the “Old Lady of Threadneedle Street”, was established in 1694, 26 years after the creation of the world’s first central bank in Sweden. With the birth of the Euro in 1999, the monetary policy powers of the central banks of 11 European countries were transferred to a new European Central Bank, based in Frankfurt. During the 1990s there was a trend to make central banks independent from political intervention in their day-to-day operations and allow them to set interest rates. Independent central banks should be able to concentrate on the long-term needs of an economy, whereas political intervention may be guided by the short-term needs of the government. In theory, an independent central bank should reduce the risk of inflation. Some central banks are legally required to set interest rates so as to hit an explicit inflation target. Politicians are often tempted to exploit a possible short-term trade-off between inflation and unemployment, even though the long-term consequence of easing policy in this way is (most economists say) that the unemployment rate returns to what you started with and inflation is higher. An independent central bank, because it does not have to worry about persuading an electorate to vote for it, is more likely to act in the best long-run interests of the economy.
Industry:Economy
The winner, at least for now, of the battle of economic “isms”. Capitalism is a free-market system built on private ownership, in particular, the idea that owners of capital have property rights that entitle them to earn a profit as a reward for putting their capital at risk in some form of economic activity. Opinion (and practice) differs considerably among capitalist countries about what role the state should play in the economy. But everyone agrees that, at the very least, for capitalism to work the state must be strong enough to guarantee property rights. According to Karl Marx, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, but so far this has proved a more accurate description of Marx’s progeny, communism.
Industry:Economy
The composition of a company’s mixture of debt and equity financing. A firm’s debt-equity ratio is often referred to as its gearing. Taking on more debt is known as gearing up, or increasing lever age. In the 1960s, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller (1923–2000) published a series of articles arguing that it did not matter whether a company financed its activities by issuing debt, or equity, or a mixture of the two. (For this they were awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. ) But, they said, this rule does not apply if one source of financing is treated more favorably by the taxman than another. In the United States, debt has long had tax advantages over equity, so their theory implies that American firms should finance themselves with debt. Companies also finance themselves by using the profit they retain after paying dividends.
Industry:Economy
Markets in securities such as bonds and shares. Governments and companies use them to raise longer-term capital from investors, although few of the millions of capital-market transactions every day involve the issuer of the security. Most trades are in the secondary markets, between investors who have bought the securities and other investors who want to buy them. Contrast with money markets, where short-term capital is raised.
Industry:Economy
Government-imposed restrictions on the ability of capital to move in or out of a country. Examples include limits on foreign investment in a country’s financial markets, on direct investment by foreigners in businesses or property, and on domestic residents’ investments abroad. Until the 20th century capital controls were uncommon, but many countries then imposed them. Following the end of the Second World War only Switzerland, Canada and the United States adopted open capital regimes. Other rich countries maintained strict controls and many made them tougher during the 1960s and 1970s. This changed in the 1980s and early 1990s, when most developed countries scrapped their capital controls. The pattern was more mixed in developing countries. Latin American countries imposed lots of them during the debt crisis of the 1980s then scrapped most of them from the late 1980s onwards. Asian countries began to loosen their widespread capital controls in the 1980s and did so more rapidly during the 1990s. In developed countries, there were two main reasons why capital controls were lifted: free markets became more fashionable and financiers became adept at finding ways around the controls. Developing countries later discovered that foreign capital could play a part in financing domestic investment, from roads in Thailand to telecoms systems in Mexico, and, furthermore, that financial capital often brought with it valuable human capital. They also found that capital controls did not work and had unwanted side-effects. Latin America’s controls in the 1980s failed to keep much money at home and also deterred foreign investment. The Asian economic crisis and capital flight of the late 1990s revived interest in capital controls, as some Asian governments wondered whether lifting the controls had left them vulnerable to the whims of international speculators, whose money could flow out of a country as fast as it once flowed in. There was also discussion of a “Tobin tax” on short-term capital movements, proposed by James Tobin, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. Even so, they mostly considered only limited controls on short-term capital movements, particularly movements out of a country, and did not reverse the broader 20-year-old process of global financial and economic liberalization.
Industry:Economy
The ratio of a bank’s capital to its total assets, required by regulators to be above a minimum (“adequate”) level so that there is little risk of the bank going bust. How high this minimum level is may vary according to how risky a bank’s activities are.
Industry:Economy
