LEGI SI CONCEPTE ECONOMICE

1. LEGI SI CONCEPTE ECONOMICE Suport pentru Cursul de Geoeconomie şi Afaceri Internaţionale 2008

2. Conceptefundamentale1The production possiblity frontier • “At any point in time, a country can produce only a certain quantity of goods and services with its limited resources … Moreover, more of one good cannot be produced without giving up some of another good… In economics, we represent this limitation on a country's productive potential by the production-possiblity frontier (PPF). The PPF represents the maximum amounts of a pair of goods or services that can be both produced with an economy’s given resources assuming that all resources are fully employed.” (Samuelson, 12)

3. Conceptefundamentale:2. Land, labor, capital • 2a. “Land – or more generally natural resources – represents the gift of nature to our productive processes. …We should also view our physical environment – the air we breathe and the water we drink – as natural resources.” • 2b. “Labor consists of the human time spent in production. … It is at once the most familiar and the most crucial input for an advanced industrial economy.” • 2c. “Capital – resources from the durable goods of an economy, produced in order to produce yet other goods. … The accumulation of specialized capital goods is essential to the task of economic development.” (Samuelson, p.20) • “But the essential property of capital good is that it is both an input and an output.” (Samuelson, p.269)

4. Conceptefundamentale:3. Capitalism, Market, Prices, Money • 3a Capitalism: “The ability of individuals to own and profit from capital is what gives capitalism its name.” • 3b Market: “A market is a mechanism by which buyers and sellers of a commodity interact to determine its price and quantity.” • 3c Prices: “Prices coordinate the decisions of producers and consumers in a market. Higher prices tend to reduce consumer purchases and encourage production. Lower prices encourage consumption and discourage production. Prices are the balance wheel in the market mechanism.” • 3d Money: “Money is the means of payment or the medium of exchange.” (Samuelson, 30-37)

5. Conceptefundamentale:invisible hand • “It is a technical term that refers to a market in which no firm or consumer is large enough to affect the market price. … • The invisible hand doctrine is about economies in which all the markets are perfectly competitive.” • “This principle holds that, in selfishly pursuing only his or her personal good, every individual is led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all.” (Samuelson, 40)

6. Conceptefundamentale:rent, profit, wage (real) • “The concept of rent applies to any factor that is fixed in supply. Any payments for the use of unique factors of production are rents.” (Samuelson 264-265) • “Profits are a residual income item equal to total revenues minus total costs.” (Samuelson, p.270) • “In analyzing labor’s earnings, we are interested in real wages, which represent the purchasing power of an hour’s work or the money wages divided by the cost of living”. (Samuelson, p.233)

7. Câteva legi economice Samuelson şi Nordhaus, Economics, 1992 (legi care guvernează cererea şi oferta) • LEGEA RARITĂŢII - the law of scarcity: “goods are scarce because here are not enough resources to produce all the goods that people want to consume”. (8) • LEGEA DIMINUĂRII VENITURILOR - of diminishing returns: “we will get less and less extra output when we add successive doses of an input while holding other inputs fixed.” (27). • LEGEA DIMINUĂRII UTILITĂŢII MARGINALE - of diminishing utility: “the amount of extra marginal utility declines as a person consumes more and more of a good.” (84). • PARADOXUL VALORII - AL DIMINUĂRII VALORII - the paradox of value: “The more there is of a commodity, the less is the relative desirablity of its last little unit”. • OBS: “the price is equal to the marginal utility of the last unit bought”. De aici rezultãcã restul de utilitate devine SURPLUS DE UTILITATE (de regulã, la consumator: faptul cã acesta plãteşte mai puţin decât nivelul la care ar plãti la prima nevoie din acel produs-cu utilitate marginalãmaximã la prima întâlnire) cf 44-95. • 5. LEGEA SUBSTITUŢIEI - the law of substitution: “as you get more of a good, its substitution ratio [“points of equally desirable consumption” 102], or indifference-curve slope, diminishes.” (88). • “The scarcer a good, he greater its relative substitution value its marginal utility rises relative to the marginal utility of the good that has become plentiful”. (98).

8. Concepte fundamentale – utilitatea şi valoarea • Utility • “In a word, utility denotes satisfaction. More precisely, it refers to the subjective pleasure or usefulness that a person derives from consuming a good or service.” (Samuelson, 83) • Value • “Present Value: value today a stream of future returns generated by an asset”.

9. LEGEA ECHILIBRULUI DINTRE CERERE ŞI OFERTĂ: • „Proposition 1: (a) As a general rule, an increase in demand for a commodity (thesupply curve being constant) will rise the price of the commodity. (b) for most commodities, an increase in demand will also increase the quality demanded. A decrease in demand will have the opposite effects. • Proposition 2. An increase in supply of a commodity (the demand curve being constant) will almost certainly lower the price and increase the quantity bought and sold.” (Samuelson, Economics, 1992, p.157)

10. Antinomii fundamentale ale “timpului lung”. Sistemul mondial şi legile economice • Wallerstein: • pg.273 “Economy/polity: Economy is primarily a “world”structure but political activity takes place primarily within and through state structures whose boundaries are narrower than those of the economy. • Supply/demand: World supply is primarily a function of market-oriented “individual”production decisions. World demand is primarily a function of “socially”determined allocations of income”. • Capital/labor: Capital is accumulated by appropriating surplus produced by labor, but the more capital is accumulated, the less the role of labor in production.” • pg. 278 “(1) There is the process of expansion of the world-economy - the pushing of outer boundaries of the world-economy to the limits of the earth.... The dynamic of this expansion is located in the crises caused by the supply/demand antinomy. Each wave of expansion has revitalized demand. But the physical limits of such expansion are being approached today.” [limitele FIZICE ale expansiunii capitalului şi ofertei] • analiza economică este centrată pe individul guvernat de interes • analiza economică este centrată pe satisfacţia individuală (ofelimitate) (Wallerstein, The capitalist worldeconomy, Cambridge, 1993, p.273-278)

11. Antinomii fundamentale ale “timpului lung”. Sistemul mondial şi legile economice 2 • SCHIMBUL INEGAL – principalul produs al acestor antinomii, mai exact al antinomiei dintre sistemul mondial modern şi structurile politice locale: “Unequal exchange is the principal outcome of thisantinomy. Unequal exchange hasto do not with the initial appropriation of the surplus value, but its redistribution, ince created, from peripheral to core regions. …” (Wallerstein: 274) • “If we think of the exchange between the core and the periphery of a capitalist system being that between high-wage products and low-wage products, there results an ‘unequal exchange’ …, in which a peripheral worker needs to work many hours, at a given level of productivity, to obtain a product produced by a worker in a core country in one hour. … Without unequal exchange … it would not be profitable to maintain a capitalist world-economy, which would then either disintegrate or revert to the form of a redistributive world-empire.” • Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy, 71