GEOG 216 Lecture Notes - Consumer Sovereignty, Informal Sector, Free Market
7 views3 pages
Published on 23 Nov 2012
School
Department
Course
Professor
How Economies are Organized
- How decisions are made in terms of production + consumption
- Who is it that decides what will be produced, how distrib, where, why?
Types of economic sectors
- Primary: ex, fishing, forestry, mining, agriculture
- Secondary: ex, process, transform, fabricate, or assemble raw materials to s/other product
- Tertiary: sale + exchange of g/s, (ex, retail, professional, education, health)
- In indus soc, most workers earn $ in this sector
- Quaternary: handling + processing of knowledge + information (ex, R & D)
Patterns of production
- Formal sector
- Recog by the state (subject to law, regulation, taxation)
Taxes (gov revenues) can be used for public services + can contrib to econ growth
- Small businesses to MNCs
- Informal sector
- S/ppl can at least get s/cash
- By-pass state + gov doesn’t have revenue to establish infrastructure
- Tend to be small +/fam operated
- Subsistence farmers to urban sellers
- Dualism
- Tend to use term to describe poor nats
- Exists when extremes of wealth + poverty live side by side in an econ
Ex: foreign/domestic elites alongside mass of poorer ppl
- Public goods
- G/s provide communally
Ex: national defense, roads, parks, education, health care
Tasks of an economic society
- Organize production of enough g/s to assure its survival
- Arrange distrib of production so more production can take place
- Answer: what, how, where, to whom (benefits), by whom (decides)?
Modes of production and distribution
- Systems w/distinct relationships among factors of production (ex: land, labour, capital)
- Land: natural resources / Labour: workforce, un/skilled / Capital: machinery, investment
(Capitalist) free-market economy
- Location of decision-making
- Decentralized producer + consumer sovereignty
- Ownership + control of means of production
- Individ entrepreneurs (private enterprises) control productive processes + market the surplus
- S/times states involved in providing transportation + control certain industries to make sure
products are provided to population (theoretically all controlled by entrepreneurs)
- Private property rights