BASIC MICRO-ECONOMICS

1. Define the meaning of economics by different authors.

a. Economics is the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.
- Alfred Marshall
b. Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between
ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.
- Lionel Robbins
c. Economics comes in whenever more of one thing means less of another.
- Fritz Machlup
d. Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited human
wants.
- Richard Lipsey
2. History of economics.
The effective birth of economics as a separate discipline may be traced to the year 1776,
when the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes
of the Wealth of Nations. Economic thought goes as far back as the ancient Greeks and is
known to have been an important topic in the ancient Middle East. Today, Scottish thinker
Adam Smith is widely credited for creating the field of economics. However, he was inspired
by French writers who shared his hatred of mercantilism. Adam Smith used the ideas of
French writers to create a thesis on how economies should work, while Karl Marx and
Thomas Malthus expanded on his work—focusing on how scarcity drives economies.
3. Give different branches of economics.
The two main branches of economics are microeconomics and macroeconomics.
Macroeconomics is about the economy in general. For example, macroeconomists study
things that make a country's wealth go up and things that make millions of people lose their
jobs. Microeconomics is about smaller and more specific things such as how families and
households spend their money and how businesses operate.
There are a number of other branches of economics:

 Behavioural economics
 Business economics
 Constitutional economics
 Cultural economics
 Development economics
 Ecological economics
 Economic geography
 Economic policy Analysis[5]
 Environmental economics[6]
 Energy economics
 Financial economics
 BASIC MICRO-ECONOMICS
 Industrial economics
 Information economics
 International economics
 Labour economics
 Managerial economics
 Mathematical economics or econometrics
 Resource economics
 Urban economics
 Public economics
 descriptive, theoretical and policy economics
 monetary economics

4. Division of economics.
Based on the subject-matter, Economics can be divided into Consumption, Production,
Exchange, Distribution and Public Finance.