ACCOUNTING COST: The actual outlays or expenses incurred in production that shows up a firm's accounting statements or records. Accounting costs, while very important to accountants, company CEOs, shareholders, and the Internal Revenue Service, is only minimally important to economists. The reason is that economists are primarily interested in economic cost (also called opportunity cost). That fact is that accounting costs and economic costs aren't always the same. An opportunity or economic cost is the value of foregone production. Some economic costs, actually a lot of economic opportunity costs, never show up as accounting costs. Moreover, some accounting costs, while legal, bonified payments by a firm, are not associated with any sort of opportunity cost.

     See also | production | opportunity cost | economic cost | accounting profit | economic profit | normal profit | profit | Internal Revenue Service | x-inefficiency | economist |

ACCOUNTING COST, AmosWEB GLOSS*arama, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2025. [Accessed: July 6, 2025].

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In the circular flow model, the transfer of goods and services from the business sector to the household sector and the transfer of resource services from the household sector to the business sector. The physical flow is usually illustrated as a counter-clockwise flow for a model with the product markets at the top, resource markets at the bottom, household sector at the left, and business sector at the left. The payment flow moves in the opposite direction.

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