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17 September, 2021

Inferior good, Public good, Floating Exchange Rate, Quasi-rent, Basel II Accord, Reserve Ratio'/Cash Reserve Ratio/Cash Reserve Requirement, Gresham's Law, Opportunity cost, Cost-Push Inflation

 d).Inferior good:  A type of good for which demand declines as the level of income or real GDP in the economy increases. This occurs when a good has more costly substitutes that see an increase in demand as the society's economy improves. An inferior good is the opposite of a normal good, which experiences an increase in demand along with increases in the income level. An example of an inferior good is public transportation. When consumers have less wealth, they may forgo using their own forms of private transportation in order to cut down costs (car insurance, gas and other car upkeep costs) and instead opt to use a less expensive form of transportation (bus pass).

 e).Public good: In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalries in that individual cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others.

Examples of public goods include fresh air, knowledge, lighthouses, national defence, flood control systems and street lighting. Public goods that are available everywhere are sometimes referred to as global public goods.

f).Floating Exchange Rate: A country's exchange rate regime where its currency is set by the foreign-exchange market through supply and demand for that particular currency relative to other currencies. Thus, floating exchange rates change freely and are determined by trading in the forex market. This is in contrast to a "fixed exchange rate" regime.

g).Quasi-rent: Quasi-rent is like economic rent, but usually larger, because it is the excess of return over short run opportunity cost, which does not include the fixed cost of replacing or duplicating fixed assets such as a piece of capital or an invention. Thus, infra-marginal rent.

For example at the time of creation of Bangladesh, the demand for houses increased owning to increase in population. But the supply could not be increased because of the sacristy of building materials. For the time being, their supply was much limited as that of land. Rent rose. This abnormal increase in the return on capital invested in building is nothing but Quasi-rent.

h).Basel II Accord: The Basel Accords determine how much equity capital - known as regulatory capital - a bank must hold to buffer unexpected losses. Equity is assets minus liabilities. For a traditional bank, assets are loans and liabilities are customer deposits. But even a traditional bank is highly leveraged (i.e., the debt-to-equity or debt-to-capital ratio is much higher than for a corporation). If the assets decline in value, the equity can quickly evaporate. So, in simple terms, the Basel Accord requires banks to have an equity cushion in the event that assets decline, providing depositors with protection.

The regulatory justification for this is about the system: If big banks fail, it spells systematic trouble. If not for this, we would let banks set their own levels of equity -known as economic capital - and let the market do the disciplining. So, Basel attempts to protect the system in much the same way that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protects individual investors.

i). Reserve Ratio'/Cash Reserve Ratio/Cash Reserve Requirement: A Cash Reserve Ratio, also known as the Reserve Requirement is a regulation set by Central bank (Bangladesh Bank) which dictates the minimum amount (reserves) that a commercial bank (in some cases, any bank) must be held to customer notes and deposits. In simpler terms this is the amount the bank must surrender with/to the Central (governing) Bank.

It is a percentage of bank reserves to deposits and notes. Cash reserve ratio is also known as liquidity ratio or cash asset ratio and is utilized as a tool (sometimes) in monetary policy and as a tool to influence the country’s interest rates, borrowing and economy. For example, if the reserve ratio in the Bangladesh is determined by the central bank to be 11%, this means all banks must have 11% of their depositors' money on reserve in the bank. So, if a bank has deposits of 1 billion, it is required to have 110 million on reserve.

j). Gresham's Law: In currency valuation, Gresham's Law states that if a new coin ("bad money") is assigned the same face value as an older coin containing a higher amount of precious metal ("good money"), then the new coin will be used in circulation while the old coin will be hoarded and will disappear from circulation.

Coins were first made with gold, silver and other precious metals, which gave them their value. Over time, the amount of precious metals used to make the coin decreased because the metals were worth more on their own than when minted into the coin itself. If the value of the metal in the old coins was higher than the coin's face value, people would melt the coins down and sell the metal. Similarly, if a low quality good is passed off as a high quality good, then the market will drive down prices because consumers won't be able to determine the good's real value.

k). Opportunity cost: Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative that is not chosen. It is the sacrifice related to the second best choice available to someone, or group, who has picked among several mutually exclusive choices. The opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice".

Example: The difference in return between a chosen investment and one that is necessarily passed up. Say you invest in a stock and it returns a paltry 2% over the year. In placing your money in the stock, you gave up the opportunity of another investment - say, a risk-free government bond yielding 6%. In this situation, your opportunity costs are 4% (6% - 2%).

L).Cost-Push Inflation:

Definition: Cost push inflation is inflation caused by an increase in prices of inputs like labor, raw material, etc. The increased price of the factors of production leads to a decreased supply of these goods. While the demand remains constant, the prices of commodities increase causing a rise in the overall price level. This is in essence cost push inflation.
In this case, the overall price level increases due to higher costs of production which reflects in terms of increased prices of goods and commodities which majorly use these inputs. This is inflation triggered from supply side i.e. because of less supply. The opposite effect of this is called demand pull inflation where higher demand triggers inflation.
Apart from rise in prices of inputs, there could be other factors leading to supply side inflation such as natural disasters or depletion of natural resources, monopoly, government regulation or taxation, change in exchange rates, etc. Generally, cost push inflation may occur in case of an inelastic demand curve where the demand cannot be easily adjusted according to rising prices.