Profit means different things to different people. The word ‘profit’ has different meanings to business, accountants, tax collectors workers and economists. In a general sense, profit is regarded as income of the equity shareholders. Similarly wages getting accumulated of a labor, rent accruing to the owners of any land or building and interest getting due to the investors capital of a business, are a kind of profit for labors, land owners and investors. To an accountant, profit means the excess of revenue over all paid out costs including both manufacturing and overhead expenses. It is much similar to net profit. In economics, profit is called pure profit, which may be defined as a residual left after all contractual costs have been met, including the transfer costs of management insurable risks, depreciation and payment to shareholders, sufficient to maintain investment at its current level. Profit is usually perceived as earnings and Continue reading
Economics Concepts
Government – Meaning and Roles
Government is one of humanity’s oldest and most important institutions. Since the early times, some kind of government has been an important source in the society. Every society needs some people to make and enforce decisions upon the society and the government refers to the process of exercising power in a group. Government generally means the public government as of a nation, state, province, country, city or village. Government affects the activity of every human in important ways. Form of government refers to the set of political institutions by which a government of a state or a country is organized. Each successive government is composed of a body of individuals who control and exercises control over political decision-making. Their function is to make and enforce laws and arbitrate conflicts. In some countries and states this group is often of hereditary class and in some of democracy, where political roles remain Continue reading
Techniques of Demand Forecasting
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to demand forecasting– one is to obtain information about the likely purchase behavior of the buyer through collecting expert’s opinion or by conducting interviews with consumers, the other is to use past experience as a guide through a set of statistical techniques. Both these techniques of demand forecasting rely on varying degrees of judgment. The first method is usually found suitable for short-term forecasting, the latter for long-term forecasting. There are specific techniques which fall under each of these broad methods. Judgmental Approaches to Forecasting By their nature, judgment-based forecasts use subjective and qualitative data to forecast future outcomes. They inherently rely on expert opinion, experience, judgment, intuition, conjecture, and other “soft” data. Such techniques are often used when historical data are not available, as is the case with the introduction of a new product or service, and in forecasting the impact of fundamental Continue reading
Usage of Macroeconomics for Business Decisions
Decision making is an important job of corporate managers. They have to take decisions regarding the employment of land, labor, and capital in such a manner that output may be maximized at least possible cost. Hence, they are always in search of optimum combination of resources which would maximize corporate profit. Appropriate decision making is the strength of business. Success in business depends on proper and correct decision making. Location, scale of operation, quantum of resources to be employed, marketing etc are some of the important problems calling for decisions in business where macroeconomics may be applied for better results. Macro Economic Analysis Macroeconomics is concerned with the study of aggregate economic variables. It is concerned with the whole economy and studies the level and the growth of national income, the levels of employment, the level of private and government spending, the balance of payments, the consumption & the investment, saving functions Continue reading
Price Analysis and Theory of the Firm
To understand the concept of market and its various conditions, it is necessary to study the theory of the firm. This is discussed as follows: The basic, assumptions of the theory of the firm are as follows: The objective of a firm is to maximize net revenue in the face of given prices and technologically determined production function. A price increase far a product raises its supply, whereas prices increase for a factor reduces its demand. The theory of the firm deals with the role of business firms in the resource allocation process. It uses aggregation as a tactic and attempts to specify total market supply and demand curves. The firm operates with perfect knowledge of all relevant variable involved in making a decision and it acts rationally while doing so. Originally the theory assumed that the firm is operating within a perfectly competitive market. But it has now been Continue reading
The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility
The law of diminishing marginal utility was first developed by a German economist Hermann Heinrich Gossen. This law is also known as the first law of Gossen. The law of diminishing marginal utility states that the marginal utility derived from the consumption of every additional unit goes on diminishing, other thing remaining the same. The law of diminishing marginal utility is based on two important facts : Though human wants are unlimited, each single want is satiable. Commodities are not perfect substitute for each other. Therefore, as a consumer consumes more and more units of a commodity, intensity of his/her want for the commodity goes on falling and reaches a point where a consumer do not want any more units of the commodity. That is, when saturation point is reached marginal utility of a commodity becomes zero. Thus, as the amount of consumption of a commodity increases, marginal utility decreases. Continue reading