Microeconomics,, 16th Canadian Edition

challenges for government policy: How can we reap the benefits of these new developments while ensuring that our citizens contin ...

individuals, all while the incomes of those in the “middle classes” have grown very slowly. The causes of this rising inequality ...

1.1 What Is Economics? The issues described in the introduction would not matter much if we lived in an economy of such plenty t ...

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited human wants. Scarcity is inevitable and is central to ...

Scarcity and Choice For almost all of the world’s 7.6 billion people, scarcity is real and ever- present. As we said earlier, re ...

Figure 1-1 Choosing Between Road Repair and New Bicycle Paths Scarcity implies that choices must be made, and making choices imp ...

Scarce resources force a choice among competing alternatives. Given a total budget of $12 million that must be split between roa ...

in this case we say that two kilometres of bicycle path is the opportunity cost of one kilometre of road repair. Every time a ch ...

kilometre of road repair. Note that 0.5 is the slope of the green budget line. The concept of opportunity cost is pervasive in e ...

The key point is that the opportunity cost of a university education does not include just the out-of-pocket expenses on tuition ...

The nature of Susan’s planning decision to allocate a set budget between two activities seems relatively straightforward—althoug ...

as a whole allocates its scarce resources—its land, labour, and capital— between the production of various goods and services. P ...

Figure 1-2 A Production Possibilities Boundary resources are being used efficiently, producing more of one good requires produci ...

The shape of the production possibilities boundary in Figure 1-2 implies that an increasing amount of consumption goods must be ...

suited to the production of consumption goods, like arable agricultural land. As we produce more and more investment goods (by d ...

Four Key Economic Problems Modern economies involve millions of complex production and consumption activities. Despite this comp ...

What Is Consumed and by Whom? Economists seek to understand what determines the distribution of a nation’s total output among ...

Figure 1-3 The Effect of Economic Growth on the Production Possibilities Boundary The capacity to produce goods and services gro ...

Microeconomics and Macroeconomics Questions relating to what is produced and how, and what is consumed and by whom, fall within ...

Economics and Government Policy The design and effectiveness of government policy matters for each of our four key economic prob ...