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| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Aggregate | The total of all individual economic units or quantities in an economy. |
| Allocation | The distribution of resources, goods, or services among various uses or individuals. |
| Amortization | The gradual paying off of debt through regular installments. |
| Arbitrage | The practice of taking advantage of price differences in different markets to make a profit. |
| Asymmetric Information | A situation in which one party to a transaction has more or better information than the other, leading to potential market inefficiencies. |
| Asset | Anything of value owned by an individual, corporation, or country, which has the potential to generate future economic benefits. |
| Appreciation | An increase in the value of an asset or currency over time. |
| Average Cost | The total cost of production divided by the quantity of output, providing a per-unit cost of production. |
| Allocation Efficiency | The optimal distribution of resources to maximize overall economic welfare. |
| Ad valorem | A tax based on the value of a transaction or property. |
| Abandonment of the Gold Standard | The decision by a government to abandon a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. |
| Absolute Advantage | The ability of a party to produce a greater quantity of a good, product, or service than competitors using the same amount of resources. |
| Absolute Poverty | Poverty defined concerning an absolute material standard of living. |
| Accelerator Investment | Investment spending that stimulates economic growth, leading to further investment spending. |
| Adaptive Expectations | A hypothetical process by which people form expectations about the future based on past events. |
| Aggregate Demand (AD) | The total demand for goods and services in an economy. It specifies the amounts of goods and services that will be purchased at all possible price levels. |
| Aggregate Supply (AS) | The total supply of goods and services in an economy. |
| Aggregation Problem | The difficulty of finding a valid way to treat an empirical or theoretical aggregate as if it reacted like a less-aggregated measure. |
| Agricultural Economics | An applied field of economics concerned with optimizing the production and distribution of food. |
| Allocative Efficiency | The optimal allocation of productive resources to maximize individual well-being. |
| Antitrust Law | Laws that promote or maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. |
| Applied Economics | The application of economic theory and econometrics in specific settings. |
| Appropriate Technology | Technological choices that are small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally autonomous. |
| Autarky | The quality of being self-sufficient; survival without external assistance or international trade. |
| Automatic Stabilizer | Features in modern government budgets that dampen fluctuations in real GDP. |
| Autonomous Consumption | Consumption expenditure that occurs when income levels are zero. |
| Average Fixed Cost | Fixed costs of production divided by the quantity of output produced. |
| Average Tax Rate | The ratio of total taxes paid to the total tax base, expressed as a percentage. |
| Average Variable Cost | A firm’s variable costs divided by the quantity of output produced. |
| Auction | A market mechanism where buyers and sellers determine the price and allocation of goods through bidding. |
| Antitrust | Laws and regulations designed to prevent anti-competitive behavior and promote fair competition. |
| Agency Costs | Costs associated with the principal-agent relationship, leading to potential conflicts of interest. |
| Agglomeration | The concentration of economic activity or industries in a particular geographic area. |
| Absorption Costing | A method of accounting that allocates all manufacturing costs to products, including fixed and variable costs. |
| Accelerator Effect | The concept is that changes in the rate of investment can have a magnified effect on the overall level of economic activity. |
| Allocative Efficiency | The efficient allocation of resources to produce the combination of goods and services most desired by society. |
| Adverse Selection | A situation where one party in a transaction has more information than the other, leading to an unfavourable market outcome. |