income

…relates aggregate consumption to national income, is not built up from individual consumer behaviour; it is simply an empirical generalization. The focus is on income and expenditure flows rather than the operation of markets. Purchasing power flows through the system—from business investment to consumption—but it flows out of the system…

A proper understanding of income and expenditure theory requires some acquaintance with the concepts used in national income accounting. These accounts provide quantitative data on national income and national product. Reliable information on these was, for the most part, not available to economists working on problems of economic instability…

income derived from human labour. Technically, wages and salaries cover all compensation made to employees for either physical or mental work, but they do not represent the income of the self-employed. Labour costs are not identical to wage and salary costs, because total labour costs…

…computed on the basis of income received. It is usually classified as a direct tax because the burden is presumably on the individuals who pay it. Corporate income tax is imposed on net profits, computed as the excess of receipts over allowable costs.

…economics, the proportion of total income or of an increase in income that consumers tend to spend on goods and services rather than to save. The ratio of total consumption to total income is known as the average propensity to consume; an increase in consumption caused by an addition to…

…when there are changes in income. Economist John Maynard Keynes, who was the first to stress the importance of the MPC in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), believed that up to 90 percent of any increase in current income would translate into an immediate increase in…

…economics, the proportion of total income or of an increase in income that consumers save rather than spend on goods and services. The average propensity to save equals the ratio of total saving to total income; the marginal propensity to save equals the ratio of a change in saving to…

income derived from the ownership of land and other free gifts of nature. The neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall, and others after him, chose this definition for technical reasons, even though it is somewhat more restrictive than the meaning given the term in popular usage. Apart…

If one defines income as the sum of the change in a taxpayer’s consumption and the change in his or her net worth, then capital gains should logically be taxed as ordinary income. If the definition of income operative in the British tax system is accepted, capital gains…

…orderliness in the distribution of income itself among workers, whose recompense was their wages; landlords, whose income was their rents; and manufacturers, whose reward was their profits.

…the relation between capital and income. Income, like capital, is a concept that is capable of many definitions; a useful approach to the concept of income is to regard it as the gross addition to capital in a given period. For any economic unit, whether a firm or an individual,…

…not the same as net income (revenues minus expenses). For one thing, not all revenues are collected in cash. Revenue is usually recorded when a customer receives merchandise and either pays for it or promises to pay the company in the future (in which case the revenue is recorded in…

…an economic point of view, income is defined as the change in the company’s wealth during a period of time, from all sources other than the injection or withdrawal of investment funds. This general definition of income represents the amount the company could consume during the period and still have…