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The U.S. goods and services trade deficit decreased in March 2024 according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau. The deficit decreased from $69.5 billion in February (revised) to $69.4 billion in March, as imports decreased more than exports. The goods deficit increased $0.8 billion in March to $92.5 billion.
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Written byPeter Bondarenko
Peter Bondarenko
Former Assistant Editor, Economics, Encyclopædia Britannica.
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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
Although complex macroeconomic structures have been characteristic of human societies since ancient times, the discipline of macroeconomics is relatively new. Until the 1930s most economic analysis was focused on microeconomic phenomena and concentrated primarily on the study of individual consumers, firms and industries. The classical school of economic thought, which derived its main principles from Scottish economist Adam Smith’s theory of self-regulating markets, was the dominant philosophy. Accordingly, such economists believed that economy-wide events such as rising unemployment and recessions are like natural phenomena and cannot be avoided. If left undisturbed, market forces would eventually correct such problems; moreover, any intervention by the government in the operation of free markets would be ineffective at best and destructive at worst.
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The classical view of macroeconomics, which was popularized in the 19th century as laissez-faire, was shattered by the Great Depression, which began in the United States in 1929 and soon spread to the rest of the industrialized Western world. The sheer scale of the catastrophe, which lasted almost a decade and left a quarter of the U.S. workforce without jobs, threatening the economic and political stability of many countries, was sufficient to cause a paradigm shift in mainstream macroeconomic thinking, including a reevaluation of the belief that markets are self-correcting. The theoretical foundations for that change were laid in 1935–36, when the British economist John Maynard Keynes published his monumental work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes argued that most of the adverse effects of the Great Depression could have been avoided had governments acted to counter the depression by boosting spending through fiscal policy. Keynes thus ushered in a new era of macroeconomic thought that viewed the economy as something that the government should actively manage. Economists such as Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, James Tobin, Robert Solow, and many others adopted and expanded upon Keynes’s ideas, and as a result the Keynesian school of economics was born.
In contrast to the hands-off approach of classical economists, the Keynesians argued that governments have a duty to combat recessions. Although the ups and downs of the business cycle cannot be completely avoided, they can be tamed by timely intervention. At times of economic crisis, the economy is crippled because there is almost no demand for anything. As businesses’ sales decline, they begin laying off more workers, which causes a further reduction in income and demand, resulting in a prolonged recessionary cycle. Keynesians argued that, because it controls tax revenues, the government has the means to generate demand simply by increasing spending on goods and services during such times of hardship.
In the 1950s the first challenge to the Keynesian school of thought came from the monetarists, who were led by the influential University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. Friedman proposed an alternative explanation of the Great Depression: he argued that what had started as a recession was turned into a prolonged depression because of the dis...
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What is a national economy?
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The meaning of NATIONAL ECONOMY is the economy of a nation; specifically : the economy of a nation as a whole that is an economic unit and is usually held to have a unique existence greater than the sum of the individual units within it.
United States - Monthly Data. (1) In percent, seasonally adjusted. Annual averages are available for Not Seasonally Adjusted data. (2) Number of jobs, in thousands, seasonally adjusted. (3) Average Hourly Earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls. (4) All items, U.S. city average, all urban consumers, 1982-84=100, 1-month percent ...
The United States has been the world's largest national economy in terms of GDP since around 1890. For many years following the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the danger of recession appeared most serious, the government strengthened the economy by spending heavily itself or cutting taxes so that consumers would spend more and by fostering ...
- October 1, 2022 – September 30, 2023
- 340,332,281 (August 30, 2023)
Other articles where national economy is discussed: economic system: Centralized states: Very little is known of the origin of the second of the great systems of social coordination—namely, the creation of a central apparatus of command and rulership. From ancient clusters of population, impressive civilizations emerged in Egypt, China, and India during the 3rd…
What is National Economy? A national economy is the production, distribution and trade, consumption of goods and services by different agents of a nation. The national economy in a global context is primarily about macroeconomics. But microeconomic principles do influence the behaviour of the macroeconomy.
