ABSTRACT
Economics is the study of choice under scarcity. Typically consumers want more goods and services than they can afford to buy. Similarly, businesses face constraints in relation to the funds and resources they have access to. Governments and countries also face the same type of problem: a government might want to tackle a large number of social problems but only have limited resources to draw on. Economics is about understanding how a party (that is, a consumer, a business, a country and so on) deals with the fact that when they use their resources to pursue one option, they cannot use those resources to do something else. And so, a consumer may have to choose between a new pair of shoes or a textbook, a firm may have to choose between developing a new product or launching a marketing campaign, and a government may have to choose between improving education or targeting crime.
