Ekonomics

Ekonomics is the study of how societies allocate scarce resources among competing uses. It analyzes how individuals, firms, and governments make choices under constraints and how these choices interact in markets, institutions, and policy frameworks. The term is often treated as synonymous with economics, though some authors use the spelling ekonomics to emphasize historical or institutional perspectives.

The field is divided into microeconomics, which examines decision making by agents and the functioning of markets for goods, services, and inputs, and macroeconomics, which looks at aggregate outcomes such as economic growth, unemployment, inflation, and the balance of payments. Econometrics, the application of statistical methods to economic data, provides empirical tests of theories and models. Behavioral economics incorporates psychology to explain deviations from fully rational behavior. Other subfields include institutional economics, development economics, international economics, financial economics, and energy and environmental economics.

Core concepts include scarcity, opportunity cost, utility, profit, and costs; supply and demand, market equilibrium, and price theory; elasticity, marginal analysis, and comparative advantage. Externalities, public goods, and information asymmetries explain market failures and the rationale for public policy. Methods range from theoretical models and mathematical analysis to empirical work and natural or laboratory experiments.

Applications of ekonomics inform policy in areas such as monetary and fiscal policy, regulation, taxation, trade policy, and development strategies. Critics emphasize issues of equity, measurement, and the simplifications inherent in models. The field continually evolves as data, computational tools, and global economic changes expand the set of questions scholars investigate.