Concept
The Wealth of Nations
Related concepts (24)
Corn Laws
The Corn Laws were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and corn enforced in the United Kingdom between 1815 and 1846. The word corn in British English denoted all cereal grains, including wheat, oats and barley. They were designed to keep corn prices high to favour domestic producers, and represented British mercantilism. The Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn, initially by simply forbidding importation below a set price, and later by imposing steep import duties, making it too expensive to import it from abroad, even when food supplies were short.
Barter
In trade, barter (derived from baretor) is a system of exchange in which participants in a transaction directly exchange goods or services for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. Economists usually distinguish barter from gift economies in many ways; barter, for example, features immediate reciprocal exchange, not one delayed in time. Barter usually takes place on a bilateral basis, but may be multilateral (if it is mediated through a trade exchange).
Absolute advantage
In economics, the principle of absolute advantage is the ability of a party (an individual, or firm, or country) to produce a good or service more efficiently than its competitors. The Scottish economist Adam Smith first described the principle of absolute advantage in the context of international trade in 1776, using labor as the only input. Since absolute advantage is determined by a simple comparison of labor productiveness, it is possible for a party to have no absolute advantage in anything.
Gains from trade
In economics, gains from trade are the net benefits to economic agents from being allowed an increase in voluntary trading with each other. In technical terms, they are the increase of consumer surplus plus producer surplus from lower tariffs or otherwise liberalizing trade. Gains from trade are commonly described as resulting from: specialization in production from division of labor, economies of scale, scope, and agglomeration and relative availability of factor resources in types of output by farms, businesses, location and economies a resulting increase in total output possibilities trade through markets from sale of one type of output for other, more highly valued goods.