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The time required to start a business is the number of calendar days needed to complete the procedures to legally operate a business. This chart is from 2017 statistics.

Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."

A business entity is not necessarily separate from the owner and the creditors can hold the owner liable for debts the business has acquired. The taxation system for businesses is different from that of the corporates. A business structure does not allow for corporate tax rates. The proprietor is personally taxed on all income from the business.

A distinction is made in law and public offices between the term business and a company such as a corporation or cooperative. Colloquially, the terms are used interchangeably. (Full article...)

Economics (/ˌɛkəˈnɒmɪks, ˌkə-/) is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.

Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings, and investment expenditure interact, and factors affecting it: factors of production, such as labour, capital, land, and enterprise, inflation, economic growth, and public policies that have impact on these elements. It also seeks to analyse and describe the global economy. (Full article...)

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The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was written by the British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Although The General Theory was written in the aftermath of the Great Depression and was taken by many to justify the assumption by government of the responsibility for the achievement and maintenance of full employment, it is for the most part a highly abstract work of theory and by no means a tract on policy. Its full meaning and significance continues to be debated even today. As a book, it is a difficult read for a modern student of economics, although it is enlivened by some brilliant rhetorical passages, including the description of the stock market in Chapter 12 and the concluding chapter 24 on the (rather tentative) policy implications Keynes derived from his theory.

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Say no to bribes in Zambia.
Photo credit: Lars Plougmann

Bribery around the world is estimated at about $1 trillion (£494bn). The burden of corruption falls disproportionately on the bottom billion people living in extreme poverty who cannot afford to pay and who thus receive sub-standard treatment from officials.

Selected economy

Tripoli, financial capital of Libya

The economy of Libya depends primarily on revenues from the petroleum sector, which represents over 95% of export earnings and 60% of GDP. These oil revenues and a small population have given Libya one of the highest nominal per capita GDP in Africa.

After 2000, Libya recorded favorable growth rates with an estimated 10.6% growth of GDP in 2010. This development was interrupted by the Libyan Civil War, which resulted in contraction of the economy by 62.1% in 2011. After the war, the economy rebounded by 104.5% in 2012. It crashed again following the Second Libyan Civil War. As of 2017, Libya's per capita PPP GDP stands at 60% of its pre-war level. (Full article...)

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"However no decentralized pricing system can serve to determine optimally these levels of collective consumption. Other kinds of "voting" or "signalling" would have to be tried. But, and this is the point sensed by Wicksell but perhaps not fully appreciated by Lindahl, now it is in the selfish interest of each person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective consumption activity than he really has, etc. I must emphasize this: taxing according to a benefit theory of taxation can not at all solve the computational problem in the decentralized manner possible for the first category of "private" goods to which the ordinary market pricing applies and which do not have the "external effects" basic to the very notion of collective consumption goods. Of course, utopian voting and signalling schemes can be imagined. ("Scandinavian consensus," Kant's "categorical imperative," and other devices meaningful only under conditions of "symmetry," etc.) The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution "exists"; the problem is how to "find" it."

Paul Samuelson, The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure, 1954

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On this day in business history

December 4:

  • 1935 - Paul O'Neill, prior to his term as Secretary of the Treasury, was chairman and CEO of Pittsburgh-based industrial giant Alcoa and chairman of the RAND Corporation, was born on this day.

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The following are images from various business-related articles on Wikipedia.

More did you know

  • ... that Italy is the third largest producer of wine in the world?
  • ...that Calouste Gulbenkian was known as Mr. Five Percent because he retained 5% of the shares of Royal Dutch/Shell, the second-largest corporation in the world by revenue, which he participated in the formation of in 1907?

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