Synonyms
Introduction
Economics is the science of allocating scarce resources among competing ends (Dorfman and Dorfman 1993). It studies how and why individuals and groups make decisions about the use and distribution of valuable human and nonhuman resources (Field and Martha 2002). Economics can be categorized into positive economics – which is the study of what is – and normative economics, which is the study of what ought to be (Field and Martha 2002). Positive economics seeks to understand how an economic system actually operates by looking at the way people make decisions in different types of circumstances. It is objective in nature and can be verified. For instance, if we say that reducing land pollution from agricultural chemicals by adopting organic farming will increase production and number of species by an average of 20–25% over the next 3 years, this is an exercise of positive economics. Normative economics focuses...
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Koech, R., Coldwell, D. (2018). Economics, Ethics, and the Environment. In: Poff, D., Michalos, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_124-1
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