J-curve
The
shape of the trend of a country’s trade balance following a devaluation. A
lower exchange rate initially means cheaper exports and more expensive imports,
making the current account worse (a bigger deficit or smaller surplus). After a
while, though, the volume of exports will start to rise because of their lower
price to foreign buyers, and domestic consumers will buy fewer of the costlier
imports. Eventually, the trade balance will improve on what it was before the
devaluation. If there is a currency appreciation there may be an inverted
j-curve.
Job search
The
time taken to find a new job. Because some people will devote all their time to
this search, there will always be some frictional unemployment, even when there
is otherwise full employment.
Joint supply
Some
products or production processes have more than one use. For instance, cows can
both provide milk and be eaten. If farmers increase the number of cows they own
in response to an increase in demand for milk, they are also likely to increase,
a little later, the supply of meat, causing beef prices to fall.
Keynes, john maynard
A
much quoted, great british economist, not famous for holding the same opinion
for long. Born in 1883, he studied at cambridge but came to reject much of the
classical economics and neo-classical economics associated with that
university. Keynes helped set up the bretton woods framework, but he is best
known for his general theory of employment, interest and money, published in
1936 in the depths of the great depression. This invented modern
macroeconomics. It argued that economies could sometimes be stable (in
equilibrium) even when they did not have full employment, but that a government
could remedy this under-employment problem by increasing public spending and/or
reducing taxation, thereby increasing the level of aggregate demand in the
economy. Many politicians picked up on these ideas. As president richard nixon
observed in 1971, 'we are all keynesians now.' however, it is much debated
whether keynes would have supported the way many of them put his thoughts into
practice.
Keynes
identified the economic importance of animal spirits. Making and losing
fortunes in the financial markets led him to refer to the 'casino capitalism'
of the stockmarket. He also noted that 'there is nothing so dangerous as the
pursuit of a rational investment policy in an irrational world'. He had an
amusingly accurate view of the impact and transmission of economic ideas:
'practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual
influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.' as for the
frequency with which his opinions would evolve: 'when the facts change, i
change my mind - what do you do, sir?' 'in the long run we are all dead,' he
said. For him, the long run was 1946.
Keynesian
A
branch of economics, based, often loosely, on the ideas of keynes,
characterised by a belief in active government and suspicion of market outcomes.
It was dominant in the 30 years following the second world war, and especially
during the 1960s, when fiscal policy became bigger-spending and looser in most
developed countries as policymakers tried to kill off the business cycle.
During the 1970s, widely blamed for the rise in inflation, keynesian policies
gradually gave way to monetarism and microeconomic policies that owed much to
the neo-classical economics that keynes had at times opposed. Even so, the idea
that public spending and taxation have a crucial role to play in managing
demand, in order to move towards full employment, remained at the heart of
macroeconomic policy in most countries, even after the monetarist and
supply-side revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. Recently, a school of new, more
pro-market keynesian economists has emerged, believing that most markets work,
but sometimes only slowly.
Kleptocracy
Corrupt,
thieving government, in which the politicians and bureaucrats in charge use the
powers of the state to feather their own nests. Russia in the years immediately
after the fall of communism was a clear-cut example, with mafia-friendly
government members allocating themselves valuable shares during the
privatisation of state-owned companies, accepting bribes from foreign
businesses, not collecting taxes from “helpful” companies and siphoning off
international aid into their personal offshore bank accounts.
Kondratieff wave
A
50 year-long business cycle, named after nikolai kondratieff, a russian
economist. He claimed to have identified cycles of economic activity lasting
half a century or more in his 1925 book, the long waves in economic life.
Because this implied that capitalism was, ultimately, a stable system, in
contrast to the marxist view that it was self-destructively unstable, he ended
up in one of stalin's prisons, where he died. Alas, there is little hard evidence
to support kondratieff's conclusion.
कोई टिप्पणी नहीं:
एक टिप्पणी भेजें