Solidarity economy
Solidarity economy is an approach to economic life that prioritizes people, community, democracy, and ecological wellbeing over profit maximization.
Category
Economics Topics
Browse Qlopedia topics grouped under Economics.
18 topics, showing 1-18 on page 1 of 1.
Topics
Local currency
A local currency is money or credit designed for use within a town, region, network, or community rather than across a whole national economy.
Blue Economy
The blue economy is the use of ocean and coastal resources for livelihoods, jobs, food, transport, energy, tourism, and innovation while keeping marine ecosystems healthy enough to support those benefits over time.
Unemployment
Unemployment measures people who do not have a job, are available for work, and are actively looking. It is a key signal of labor-market health, economic stress, and the trade-offs facing households, firms, and policymakers.
Supply and demand
Supply and demand is a basic economic model for understanding how buyers and sellers interact in markets. It explains how prices and quantities tend to adjust when preferences, costs, technology, income, expectations, policy, or shocks change.
Public goods
Public goods are goods or services that people cannot easily be excluded from using and whose use by one person does not greatly reduce use by others. They help explain why markets may underprovide some valuable shared benefits.
Opportunity cost
Opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative given up when a choice is made. It helps explain why economic decisions are not only about money, but also about time, attention, resources, risk, and the options people or societies leave behind.
Monetary policy
Monetary policy is how a central bank influences money, credit, interest rates, and financial conditions to help guide inflation, employment, output, and financial stability. Its tools and goals differ across countries and exchange-rate systems.
Market failure
Market failure happens when private markets do not allocate resources efficiently for society. It can arise from externalities, public goods, monopoly power, incomplete information, coordination problems, or missing markets.
Interest rates
Interest rates are prices for borrowing or lending money over time. They shape savings, loans, mortgages, bonds, business investment, exchange rates, inflation, asset values, and central bank policy.
Inflation
Inflation is a sustained rise in the overall price level, reducing the purchasing power of money and influencing wages, savings, borrowing costs, business decisions, government budgets, and central bank policy.
Gross domestic product
Gross domestic product, or GDP, measures the value of final goods and services produced within an economy during a period of time. It is one of the most widely used indicators of economic activity, growth, and business cycles.
Fiscal policy
Fiscal policy is how governments use spending, taxation, transfers, and borrowing to influence the economy. It can support demand during downturns, fund public services and investment, redistribute income, and affect long-term debt sustainability.
Externalities
Externalities are costs or benefits from an economic activity that affect people who are not directly part of the transaction. They help explain why market prices sometimes fail to reflect the full social cost or benefit of a choice.
Comparative advantage
Comparative advantage explains why people, firms, regions, or countries can gain from specializing and trading when their opportunity costs differ. It shows that trade can be useful even when one side is more productive at everything.
Circular Economy
A circular economy is an approach to production and consumption that aims to reduce waste and pollution, keep products and materials in use for longer, and regenerate natural systems. It challenges the linear take-make-waste model by changing design, ownership, repair, reuse, business models, recycling, and policy.
Central banks
Central banks are public institutions that manage money, influence credit conditions, support payment systems, and help safeguard financial stability. Their exact powers differ by country, but they often play a central role in inflation, interest rates, banking, and crisis response.
Behavioral economics
Behavioral economics studies how real people make economic decisions when attention, emotion, habits, social context, limited information, and cognitive biases shape choices. It combines economics with psychology to explain behavior that standard models often miss.