A Glimpse of Interesting Story about Economy

Abstract

When you try to learn about the economy from the articles from newspapers or daily news, you might be confused from graphs, formulas, and economic theories that seem unrealistic. However, if we get familiar with the economy, we can learn how many economic concepts and principles are impacting our daily lives, even though we do not recognize it, and also we can learn that economic way of thinking can help us find the answers to many problems, not all though. 『Exploring the economics with real-life examples』 is a book with a collection of columns published under the same title in our monthly magazine. The writers are experts in various fields, including researchers, university professors, teachers, journalists, and entrepreneurs, and they explain the economic topics commonly shown in the articles of newspapers and daily news. The columns are categorized into five themes. The first theme, "Applying Economic way of Thinking to solve Economic Problems," introduces several economic basic concepts such as incentives, opportunity costs and sunk costs, and time preferences with examples, and describes the definition of economic way of thinking and its importance. The second theme, "Market and Competition," explains the concepts of scarcity and determination of prices, the law of demand and supply, and public goods and private goods with examples of competition in the professional sports industry and the process of wage determination of athletes. The third theme is related to public choice and game theories, and information asymmetry, and the fourth theme focuses on 'growth and welfare' and its related issues in our daily lives and other countries such as tax, subsidies, prices, economic growth, income, and happiness index. Lastly, we describe 'marketing strategies and brands' that many companies adopt as a plan for survival. The book 『Exploring the Economics with real-life examples』 does not introduce that many economic concepts or principles, nor does it explain them in detail. However, we hope that teachers, students, and even ordinary readers will be able to access those theories more easily by reading examples around us. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to the writers who contributed a column every month, and the data development team in the KDI Economic Information Center for their hard work in publishing a book.