Macroeconomics
The word macroeconomics means economics in the large. The macroeconomist's concerns are with such global questions as total production, total employment, the rate of change of overall prices, the rate of economic growth, and so on. The questions asked by the macroeconomist are in terms of broad aggregates — what determines the spending of all consumers as opposed to the microeconomic question of how the spending decisions of individual households are made.
Macroeconomists measure overall economic activity; analyze the determinants of such activity by the use of macroeconomic theory: forecast future economic activity; and attempt to formulate policy responses designed to reconcile forecasts with target values of production, employment, and prices.
An important task of macroeconomics is to develop ways of aggregating the values of the economic activities of individuals and firms into meaningful totals. To this end such concepts as gross domestic product (GDP), national income, personal income, and personal disposable income have been developed.
Macroeconomic analysis attempts to explain how the magnitudes of the principal macroeconomic variables are determined and how they interact. And through the development of theories of the business cycle and economic growth, macroeconomics helps to explain the dynamics of how these aggregates move over time.
Macroeconomics is concerned with such major policy issues as the attainment and maintenance of full employment and price stability. Considerable effort must first be expended to determine what goals could be achieved. Experience teaches that it would not be possible to eliminate inflation entirely without inducing a major recession combined with high unemployment. Similarly, an overambitious employment target would produce labor shortages and wage inflation.
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Public finance
Finance is the provision of money at the time when it is needed. It is a system of monetary relations leading to formation, distribution and use of money in the process of its turnover between economic entities.
The financial system is the network of institutions through which firms, households and units of government get the funds they need and put surplus funds to work.
Savers and borrowers are connected by financial intermediaries including banks, thrift institutions, insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds, and finance companies.
Finance in an economic system comprises two parts: public finance and finance of economic entities.
Public finance is the provision of money by the community through taxes to be spent by national and local government authorities on projects of national and local benefit. It is a collective term for the financial flows and also the financial institutions of the public sector.
Public finance has the following four functions. They are the provision of essential services, the encouragement or control of particular sectors of the economy, the implementation of social policy in respect of social services, and the encouragement of the growth of economy as a whole.
The major instrument of any financial system is the budget. In a market-oriented economy, the budget is the most important tool for achieving national priorities and goals through the allocation and distribution of resources, and the maintenance of a stable macroeconomic environment.
The budget is an estimate of national revenue and expenditure for the ensuing fiscal year. When expenditure exceeds the revenue the budget has a deficit. Revenue and expenditure forecasting is the most fundamental step in the process of budget preparation. Adequate planning of recurrent and capital expenditure depends critically on an accurate forecast of revenue availability.
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WHAT IS ECONOMICS?
Everyone goes through life having to make choices. Neither individuals nor societies can have all the things they would like to have. There simply is not enough of everything. There is no limit to the amount or kinds of things that people want. There is, however, a limit to the resources, things used to produce goods and services, available to satisfy those wants.
Once that limit is reached, nothing else can be produced. In other words, when nation's resources (all its workers, factories, farms, etc.) are fully employed, the only way it will be able to increase the production of one thing will be by reducing the production of something else. To summarize but: human wants are unlimited, the resources necessary to satisfy those wants are limited. Thus, every society is faced with the identical problem, the problem of scarcity.
Economics deals with the problems of scarcity and choice that have faced societies and nations throughout history, but the development of modern economics began in the 17th century. Since that time economists have developed methods for studying and explaining how individuals, businesses and nations use their available economic resources. Large corporations use economists to study the ways they do business and to suggest methods for making more efficient use of their employees, equipment, factories, and other resources.
Economics deals with data on income, employment, expenditure, interest rates, prices and individual activities of production, consumption, transportation, and trade. Economics deals directly with only a tiny fraction of the whole spectrum of human behavior, and so the range of problems considered by economists is relatively narrow.