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t. e. In economics, the law of increasing costs is a principle that states that to produce an increasing amount of a good a supplier must give up greater and greater amounts of another good. The best way to look at this is to review an example of an economy that only produces two things - cars and oranges. If all the resources of the economy ...
Wagner's law, also known as the law of increasing [a] state activity, [2] is the observation that public expenditure increases as national income rises. [3] It is named after the German economist Adolph Wagner (1835–1917), who first observed the effect in his own country and then for other countries.
In economics, a cost curve is a graph of the costs of production as a function of total quantity produced. In a free market economy, productively efficient firms optimize their production process by minimizing cost consistent with each possible level of production, and the result is a cost curve. Profit-maximizing firms use cost curves to ...
Thus, diminishing marginal returns imply increasing marginal costs and increasing average costs. Cost is measured in terms of opportunity cost. In this case the law also applies to societies – the opportunity cost of producing a single unit of a good generally increases as a society attempts to produce more of that good.
An increasing marginal cost curve intersects a U-shaped average cost curve at the latter's minimum, after which the average cost curve begins to slope upward. For further increases in production beyond this minimum, marginal cost is above average costs, so average costs are increasing as quantity increases.
The law of demand, however, only makes a qualitative statement in the sense that it describes the direction of change in the amount of quantity demanded but not the magnitude of change. The law of demand is represented by a graph called the demand curve, with quantity demanded on the x-axis and price on the y-axis. Demand curves are downward ...
v. t. e. In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of output produced per unit of time. A decrease in cost per unit of output enables an increase in scale that is, increased production with lowered cost. [ 1]
The graph depicts an increase (that is, right-shift) in demand from D 1 to D 2 along with the consequent increase in price and quantity required to reach a new equilibrium point on the supply curve (S). A common and specific example is the supply-and-demand graph shown at right.