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OPPORTUNITY COST: The highest valued alternative foregone in the pursuit of an activity. This is a hallmark of anything dealing with economics--and life for that matter--because any action that you take prevents you from doing something else. The ultimate source of opportunity cost is the pervasive problem of scarcity (unlimited wants and needs, but limited resources). Whenever limited resources are used to satisfy one want or need, there are an unlimited number of other wants and needs that remain unsatisfied. Herein lies the essence of opportunity cost. Doing one thing prevents doing another.

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CONTRACTION: A phase of the business cycle characterized by a general period of declining economic activity. A contraction is one of two basic business cycle phases. The other is expansion. The transition from contraction to expansion is termed a trough and the transition from expansion to contraction is termed a peak. The popular term for contraction, one that frequent shows up in the media, is recession. Should you check out the entry recession, you will see information that is essentially identical to that presented here, because they are two terms for the same phenomenon.

     See also | business cycle | recession | expansion | peak | trough | recovery | real gross domestic product | unemployment rate | unemployment | full employment | inflation | aggregate expenditures | National Income and Product Accounts | Great Depression |


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CONTRACTION, AmosWEB GLOSS*arama, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2026. [Accessed: July 21, 2026].


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PAPER ECONOMY

Markets, exchanges, and other assorted economic activities that deal with legal or paper claims on physical assets rather than the physical assets. The vast majority of activities for the paper economy take place through financial markets. The paper economy complements production and consumption activities of the real economy that involve product markets and resource markets.

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A communal society, a prime component of Karl Marx's communist philosophy, was advocated by the Greek philosophy Plato.
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