Primary Source Archives
Gale primary source archives provide researchers with firsthand content including editorials, news, surveys, statistics, and industry reports that can be used to examine and analyze economic thought, history, and theory.
Economics
Delve into the broad field of economics, which examines the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics includes the study of how individuals, businesses, governments, and nations make choices on allocating resources to satisfy their wants and needs and tries to determine how these groups should organize and coordinate efforts to achieve maximum output. The building blocks of economics are the studies of labor and trade.
There are two main branches of economics: microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics analyzes how individual consumers and producers make decisions within an economy, including how they trade with one another, the effects of supply-and-demand on the prices of goods, the efficiency and costs associated with producing goods and services, how labor is divided and allocated, uncertainty, risk, and strategic game theory within specific markets. Macroeconomics analyzes the economy as a whole (regionally, nationally, or globally); this economic analysis encompasses government fiscal and monetary policy, unemployment rates, growth as reflected by changes in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and business cycles that result in expansion, booms, recessions, and depressions.
There are several schools of thought within the field of economics, but the most well-known are the Classical and Keynesian schools. The Classical view believes that free markets are the best way to allocate resources, with limited government intervention. The Keynesian school (named for economist John Maynard Keynes), believes that the government needs to intervene in the economy on occasion to actively reallocate resources efficiently.
