- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
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A Nobel prize-winning economist, James Tobin (1918-2002) theorized that firms would continue to invest as long as the value of their shares exceeded the replacement cost of their assets. The ratio of the market value of a firm to the net replacement cost of the firm’s assets is known as “Tobin’s Q”. If q is greater than 1, then it should pay the firm to expand, as the profit it should expect to make from its assets (reflected in the share price) exceeds the cost of the assets. If Q is less than 1, the firm would be better off selling its assets, which are worth more than shareholders currently expect the firm to earn in profit by retaining them. Tobin also gave his name to the “Tobin tax”, a (so far unimplemented) proposal to reduce speculative cross-border flows of capital by levying a small tax on foreign exchange transactions.
Industry:Economy
When central banks try to influence an exchange rate by buying the currency they want to appreciate and selling the one they want to weaken. The evidence seems to suggest that it is at best a short-term measure. In the longer term, governments probably do not have the resources to beat market forces.
Industry:Economy
The part of a country's or a firm’s capital or an individual’s human capital that consists of ideas rather than something more physical. It can often be protected through patents or other intellectual property laws.
Industry:Economy
In economic terms, anything used to reduce the downside of risk. In its most familiar form, insurance is provided through a policy purchased from an insurance company. But a fuller definition would also include, say, a financial security (or anything else) used to hedge, as well as assistance available in the event of disaster. It could even be provided by the government, in various ways, including welfare payments to sick or poor people and legal protection from creditors in the event of bankruptcy. Conventional insurance works by pooling the risks of many people (or firms, and so on), all of whom might claim but in practice only a few actually do. The cost of providing assistance to those that claim is spread over all the potential claimants, thus making the insurance affordable to all. Despite the enormous attraction of insurance, private markets in insurance often work badly, or not at all. Economists have identified three main reasons for this. * Private firms are unwilling to provide insurance if they are uncertain about the likely cost of providing sufficient cover, especially if it is potentially unlimited. * moral hazard means that people with insurance may take greater risks because they know they are protected, so the insurer may get a bigger bill than it bargained for. * Insurers are at risk of adverse selection. The people who are most likely to claim buy insurance, and those who are least likely to claim do not buy it. In this situation, setting a price for insurance that will generate enough premiums to cover all claims is tricky, if not impossible. Insurers have found ways of reducing the impact of these problems. For example, to counter adverse selection, they set higher health-insurance rates for people who smoke. To limit moral hazard, they offer reduced premiums to people who agree to pay the first so-many dollars or pounds of any claim. An efficient system of insurance, in its broadest sense, can contribute to economic growth by encouraging entrepreneurial risk taking and by enabling people to choose which risks they take and which they protect themselves against.
Industry:Economy
A practice that was made illegal in the United States in 1934 and in the UK in 1980, and is now banned (for shares, at least) in most countries. Insider trading involves using information that is not in the public domain but that will move the price of a share, bond or currency when it is made public. An insider trade takes place when someone with privileged, confidential access to that information trades to take advantage of the fact that prices will move when the news gets out. This is frowned on because investors may lose confidence in financial markets if they see insiders taking advantage of advantageous asymmetric information to enrich themselves at the expense of outsiders. But some economists reckon that insider trading leads to more efficient markets: by transmitting the inside information to the market, it makes the price of, say, a company’s shares more accurate. This may be true, but most financial regulators are willing to sacrifice a degree of accuracy in pricing to ensure that outsiders (the great majority of investors) feel they are being treated fairly.
Industry:Economy
A vital contributor to economic growth. The big challenge for firms and governments is to make it happen more often. Although nobody is entirely sure why innovation takes place, new theories of endogenous growth try to model the innovation process, rather than just assume it happens for unexplained, exogenous reasons. The role of incentives seems to be particularly important. Although some innovations are the result of scientists and others engaged in the noble pursuit of know¬ledge, most, especially their commercial applications, are the result of entrepreneurs seeking profit. Joseph Schumpeter, a leading practitioner of Austrian economics, described this as a process of “creative destruction”. A firm innovates successfully and is rewarded with unusually high profits, which in turn encourages rivals to come up with a superior innovation. To encourage innovation, innovators must be allowed to make a decent profit, otherwise they will not incur the risk and expense of trying to come up with useful innovations. Most countries have patents and other laws protecting intellectual property, which allow innovators to enjoy a (usually temporary) monopoly over their innovation. Economists disagree over how long that protection should last, given the inefficiencies that result from any monopoly. For most of the second half of the 20th century, governments played a crucial role in funding and directing pure research and early-stage development. In the 1980s, however, legal changes in the United States started to reduce this role. One change aimed to move technological development out of the country’s state-financed national laboratories. Another allowed universities, not-for-profit research institutes and small businesses doing research under government contract to keep the technologies they had developed and to apply for patents in their own names. This appears to have contributed to a surge in innovation in the United States, as government researchers and university professors teamed up with outside firms, or started their own. Hoping for similar results, many other countries have followed suit. Is innovation all it is cracked up to be, or is it just change for change’s sake? A few years ago, Robert Solow, a Nobel prize-winning economist, observed that “you can see the computer age everywhere these days except in the productivity statistics”. Although new computer technology clearly had affected people and firms in visible and obvious ways, the slowdown in productivity growth that had afflicted the American economy since the 1970s did not appear to have been reversed. Believers in the new economy argued that the “Solow Paradox” no longer holds true; in the late 1990s, the computer revolution started to deliver the productivity growth long promised. Even so, this shows that innovation can take a long time to deliver the goods.
Industry:Economy
The economic arteries and veins. Roads, ports, railways, airports, power lines, pipes and wires that enable people, goods, commodities, water, energy and information to move about efficiently. Increasingly, infrastructure is regarded as a crucial source of economic competitiveness. Investment in infrastructure can yield unusually high returns because it increases people’s choices: of where to live and work, what to consume, what sort of economic activities to carry out, and of other people to communicate with. Some parts of a country’s infrastructure may be a natural monopoly, such as water pipes. Others, such as traffic lights, may be public goods. Some may have a network effect, such as telephone cables. Each of these factors has encouraged government provision of infra¬structure, often with the familiar downsides of state intervention: bad planning, inefficient delivery and corruption.
Industry:Economy
Taxes that do not come straight out of a person’s pay packet or assets, or out of company profit. For example, a consumption tax, such as value-added tax (see expenditure tax). Contrast with direct taxation, such as income tax. Indirect taxation has become increasingly popular with politicians because it may be less noticeable to people paying it than income tax and is harder to avoid paying.
Industry:Economy
A much-loathed method of taxation based on earnings. It was first collected in 1797 by the Dutch Batavian Republic. In the UK it was introduced in 1799 as a “temporary” measure to finance a war against Napoleon, abolished in 1816 and reintroduced, forever, in 1842. In most countries, people do not pay it until their income exceeds a minimum threshold, and richer people pay a higher rate of income tax than poorer people. Since the 1980s, the unpopularity with voters of high rates of income tax and concern that high rates discourage valuable economic activity have led many governments to reduce income-tax rates. However, this has not necessarily reduced the amount of total revenue collected in income tax (see Laffer curve). Nor do governments that have reduced income tax rates always cut other sorts of taxes; on the contrary, they have often increased them sharply to make up for any revenue lost as a result of lower rates of income tax.
Industry:Economy
The flow of money to the factors of production: wages to labor; profit to enterprise and capital; interest also to capital; rent to land. Wages left for spending after paying taxes is known as disposable income. For countries, see national income.
Industry:Economy
