The Business and Economics Portal

The time required to start a business is the number of calendar days needed to complete the procedures to legally operate a business. This chart is from 2017 statistics.

Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."

A business entity is not necessarily separate from the owner and the creditors can hold the owner liable for debts the business has acquired. The taxation system for businesses is different from that of the corporates. A business structure does not allow for corporate tax rates. The proprietor is personally taxed on all income from the business.

A distinction is made in law and public offices between the term business and a company such as a corporation or cooperative. Colloquially, the terms are used interchangeably. (Full article...)

Economics (/ˌɛkəˈnɒmɪks, ˌkə-/) is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.

Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings, and investment expenditure interact, and factors affecting it: factors of production, such as labour, capital, land, and enterprise, inflation, economic growth, and public policies that have impact on these elements. It also seeks to analyse and describe the global economy. (Full article...)

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Damage from Hurricane Katrina

Actuaries are business professionals who deal with the financial impact of risk and uncertainty. Actuaries are highly trained experts with a deep understanding of financial security systems, their reasons for being, their complexity, their mathematics, and the way they work. They evaluate the likelihood of future events and design creative ways to quantify the contingent outcomes in order to minimize losses associated with uncertain undesirable events. These risks can impact both sides of the balance sheet and require asset management, liability management, and valuation skills. It takes a combination of strong analytical skills, business knowledge and understanding of both human behavior and the vagaries of information systems to design and manage programs that control risk. Actuaries work in a number of insurance disciplines, which may be classified as life, health, pensions, annuities, and asset management, social welfare programs, property, casualty, liability, general insurance and reinsurance.

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Roman soldiers building a fortress, Trajan's Column, 113 AD
Photo credit: Genghiskhanviet

Project management is the process and activity of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources, procedures and protocols to achieve specific goals in scientific or daily problems. A project is a temporary endeavor designed to produce a unique product, service or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual (or operations), which are repetitive, permanent, or semi-permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies.)

Selected economy

The City of London, the financial capital of England, and the United Kingdom as a whole

The economy of England is the largest economy of the four countries of the United Kingdom. England's economy is one of the largest and most dynamic in the world, with an average GDP per capita of £37,852 in 2022.

His Majesty's Treasury, led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is responsible for developing and executing the government's public finance policy and economic policy. Government involvement is also primarily exercised by the Department for Business and Trade and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Regarded as a highly developed social market economy, it has adopted many free market principles, yet maintains an advanced social welfare infrastructure. (Full article...)

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"Instead, this 'loss out of nowhere' is hidden in the detail that economists lose by treating infinitesimally small quantities as zeros. If perfectly competitive firms were to produce where marginal cost equals price, then they would be producing part of their output past the point at which marginal revenue equals marginal cost. They would therefore make a loss on these additional units of output.

As I argued above, the demand curve for a single firm cannot be horizontal-it must slope downwards, because if it doesn't, then the market demand curve has to be horizontal. Therefore, marginal revenue will be less than price for the individual firm. However, by arguing that an infinitesimal segment of the market demand is effectively horizontal, economists have treated this loss as zero. Summing zero losses over all firms means zero losses in the aggregate. But this is not consistent with their vision of the output and price levels of the perfectly competitive industry.

The higher level of output must mean losses are incurred by the industry, relative to the profit-maximizing level chosen by monopoly. Losses at the market level must mean losses at the individual firm level- yet these are presumed to be zero by economic analysis, because it erroneously assumes that the perfectly competitive firm faces a horizontal demand curve."

Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, 2011

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On this day in business history

October 17:

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The following are images from various business-related articles on Wikipedia.

More did you know

  • ...that Valrhona, a company based in the small town of Tain l'Hermitage in the Rhône Valley in France, is one of the world's leading manufacturers of high-quality chocolate?
  • ... that Hollywood accounting is the practice of distributing the profit earned by a large project to corporate entities which, though distinct from the one responsible for the project itself, are typically owned by the same people, with the net result of reducing the project's profit by a substantial margin, sometimes even eliminating it altogether.

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