production

All production systems, when viewed at the most abstract level, might be said to be “transformation processes”—processes that transform resources into useful goods and services. The transformation process typically uses common resources such as labour, capital (for machinery and equipment, materials, etc.), and space (land, buildings,…

…embodiment of “original factors of production” in capital goods of greater or lesser length of life that then yielded value or utility as they were consumed. Between the original embodiment of the factor and the final fruition in consumption lay an interval of time known as the period of production.…

…the basis of cost of production. That is, if commodity A costs twice as much to produce as commodity B, the price of A will be pushed toward a level twice as high as that of B. If this were not the case—if, for example, A sold for three times…

…significantly above average costs of production, so that profits do not appreciably exceed a normal interest return on investment. Prices should be responsive to basic reductions in costs. (2) Insofar as average costs of production are affected by the scales or capacities of plants and firms, the preponderance of industry…

…development, the increased complexity of products and equipment, and new methods of collecting, storing, and processing information, along with other developments of management procedures, have all acted to increase the numbers of administrative, clerical, and technical workers relative to manual workers. A second course of change has affected occupations linked…

…of all the means of production, it had no blueprint as to what to do next. The evolution of central economic planning in the Soviet Union was largely a pragmatic affair; methods were tried and discarded, and new ones were introduced. The decision in 1927 to undertake rapid and large-scale…

…designed to break bottlenecks in production in important sectors of the economy; and (4) by trying to improve the coordination between different parts of the economy. Of these, the first and fourth are perhaps the most important and the least understood function of economic planning. The other two functions of…

…use n variable factors of production; that is, factors like hourly paid production workers and raw materials, the quantities of which can be increased or decreased. In the formula the quantity of the first variable factor is denoted by x₁ and so on. The firm is also presumed to use…

…incomes are earned in the production of goods and services and that the value of the productive factor reflects its contribution to the total product. Though this fundamental truth was already recognized at the beginning of the 19th century (by the French economist J.B. Say, for instance), its development was…

…of the feudal mode of production. Marx and Engels did not try to establish that the feudal period had existed universally; they formulated for Asia the idea of a specific Asiatic mode of production. Still, by incorporating “the feudal mode of production” into their design, they endowed it with seminal…

…part of the economy that creates services rather than tangible objects. Economists divide all economic activity into two broad categories, goods and services. Goods-producing industries are agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction; each of them creates some kind of tangible object. Service industries include everything else: banking, communications, wholesale and retail…

Production moves away from the household to the factory. The commons are enclosed, and the land commercially exploited for national and international markets. Some individuals become the owners and the managers of the new system. But the bulk of family members must become either landless…

…nation should specialize in the production of goods it is particularly well equipped to produce; it should export part of this production, taking in exchange other goods that it cannot so readily turn out. Smith did not expand these ideas at much length, but another classical economist, David Ricardo, developed…

…country that specializes in the production of the goods it can produce relatively more efficiently (the same country would import everything else). For example, India might be able to produce everything more efficiently than England, but India might profit most by concentrating its resources on textiles, in which its efficiency…

…that the more the worker produces the less he has to consume, and the more values he creates the more he devalues himself, because his product and his labour are estranged from him. The life of the worker depends on things that he has created but that are not his,…

…determined by the relations of production. They are social relations; relations of collaboration or mutual aid, relations of domination or submission; and finally, transitory relations that characterize a period of passage from one system to another. “The history of the development of society is, above all, the history of the…

…another is its mode of production (i.e., the nature of its technology and division of labour), and each mode of production engenders a distinctive class system in which one class controls and directs the process of production while another class is, or other classes are, the direct producers and providers…

…prices of inputs (factors of production), which have yet to be determined. If the firm wants to maximize profits (defined as the difference between the sales value of its output and the cost of its inputs), it will select that combination of inputs that minimizes its expenses and therefore maximizes…

…governments buy directly from private producers at higher-than-market prices, maintain higher prices through manipulation of markets, provide services to private enterprises at prices below the cost of providing the service, or grant special tax concessions.