Economics

A social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. It is a relatively new academic discipline: the first major book on Economics, [[Adam Smith|Adam Smith's]] ''The Wealth of Nations'' was published in 1776.

There is an economic aspect to almost any topic one can think of - [[Education]], [[Religion]], [[Politics]], [[Employment]], [[Trasport]], [[Defence]], etc. Economics is, therefore, a pervasive theory of how society works. 

One of the guiding ideas in Economics is scarcity. Virtually everything is scarce; there are not enough resources around world to satisfy humanity. It is not only the poor who feel deprived; even the relatively well-off seem to want more. It is the economists job to evaluate the choices that exist for the use of those resources.

The major divisions of Economics include [[Microeconomics]], which deals with the  behaviour of individual consumers, companies, traders, and farmers; and [[Macroeconomics]], which focuses on aggregates such as the level of income in an economy, the volume of total employment, and the flow of investment. Another branch,
[[Development Economics]], investigates the history and changes of economic activity and organization over a period of time, as well as their relation to other activities and institutions. Within these three major divisions there are specialized areas of study
that attempt to answer questions on a broad spectrum of human economic activity, including public finance, money supply and banking, international trade, labour, industrial organization, and [[Agriculture]]. The areas of investigation in Economics overlap with other social sciences, particularly [[Political Science]], but Economics is primarily concerned with relations between buyer and seller.

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[[Microeconomics]] --  [[Macroeconomics]] -- [[Development Economics]]
[[Recession]] -- [[Inflation]]