INTRODUCTION TO AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS AND MARKETING

• ECONOMICS - Defined as the study of scarcity, how people use resources or the study of decision-making
• OIKOS - It means House
• NOMOS - It means law
• Economics literally translates to?

  THE ART OF HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT
• MICROECONOMICS - is a branch of economics that focuses on the behavior and decisions of individual economic agents, such as households, firms, and industries
• MACROECONOMICS - is the branch of economics that studies the overall performance and behavior of an economy
• AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS - is a specialized branch of economics that applies economic principles to understand and analyze issues related to agriculture
• POSITIVE ECONOMICS - is a stream of economics that focuses on the description, quantification, and explanation of economic developments, expectations, and associated phenomena
• NORMATIVE ECONOMICS - It focuses on value-based judgments aimed at improving economic development, investment projects, and the distribution of wealth
• Economics shares common interests with sociology in studying human behavior but focuses on economic aspects
• Political science and economics intersect in the study of policies and governance
• PSYCHOLOGY - contributes to understanding individual economic decision-making
• ANTHROPOLOGY - It provides insights into economic activities in different societies
• The fundamental economic problem is the SCARCITY of resources relative to unlimited human wants. 
• scarcity gives rise to three basic economic problems, these are?

  WHAT TO PRODUCE HOW TO PRODUCE FOR WHOM TO PRODUCE
• EFFICIENCY - The first economic goals, the government should be efficient
• EQUITY - ensuring the equal distribution of resources
• FULL EMPLOYMENT - The government should ensure it provides equal job opportunities to its citizens
• STABILITY - It ensures that economy is stable by controlling inflation
• ECONOMIC GROWTH - the government should focus on growing the country's GDP
• INCENTIVES - These are important because they help explain how rational decisions are made
• TRADE-OFFS - It exists when a decision-maker must choose a course of action
• Each time we make a choice, we experience an opportunity cost, or a lost chance to do something else
• MARGINAL THINKING -It requires a decision a decision-maker to weigh the extra benefits against the extra costs
• TRADE CREATES VALUE - Participants in markets can specialize in the production of goods and services that they have a comparative advantage in making
• CAPITALISM - It is often thought of as an economic system in which private actors own and control property in accord with their interests, and demand and supply freely set prices in markets in a way that can serve the best interests of society
• COMMUNISM - A political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society
• SOCIALISM - It is a populist economic and political system based on collective, common, or public ownership of the means of production
• FASCISM- It has commonly sought to eliminate the autonomy of large-scale capitalism and relegate it to the state. However, it does support private property rights and the existence of a market economy and very wealthy individuals
• NAZISM - A totalitarian movement led by Adolf Hitler as head of the Nazi Party in Germany. In its intense nationalism, mass appeal, and dictatorial rule
• ADAM'S SMITH LAW OF ACCUMULATION - It provided one of the earliest observations on the operation of the capitalist market system that is the ‘ invisible hand’. The invisible hand being simply the forces of supply and demand working to attain equilibrium in a competitive economy
• MALTHUS THEORY OF ECONOMIC GROWTH - This theory assumed that population would grow whenever income rose above the level of necessary subsistence. it argues that the limit on population expansion was the inability to produce sufficient food to continue to sustain a population growth
• THE ROBERT SOLOW GROWTH MODEL - This model focuses on four variables: output (Y), capital (K), labor (L), and “knowledge” or the “effectiveness of labor” (A). At any time, the economy has some amounts of capital, labor, and knowledge, and these are combined to produce output
• ROSENSTEIN-RODAN'S BIG PUSH THEORY - The author of this theory argued that less developed countries need a ‘ big push’ of concurrent investments or large-scale investments in several branches of industry in order for economic growth to take place
• RAGNAR NURKSE'S THEORY OF BALANCED GROWTH - It propounds that a big input of new technology, new machines and production processes spread across a broad range of industrial sectors is the key to initiate a rapid development process in less-developed nations
• ALBERT HIRSCHMAN'S UNBALANCED GROWTH - This theory raised concerns about the fact that whether the resources, which were needed to realize a big push and balanced growth, were available in less-developed nations; a theory believed that contradicts the theory of the big push and the balanced growth