A

Adam Smith

Adam Smith (baptised 16 June 1723 – died 17 July 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economics. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics.

B

Biofuel

Biofuels are a wide range of fuels which are in some way derived from biomass. The term covers solid biomass, liquid fuels and various biogases.

Biological determinism

Biological determinism (also biologism) is the interpretation of humans and human life from a strictly biological point of view, and it is closely related to genetic determinism. Another definition is that biological determinism is the that biological factors such as an organism's individual genes (as opposed to social or environmental factors) completely determine how a behaves or changes over time.

C

CCJ

In England and Wales (Scotland has its own legal system), County Court Judgments (CCJs) are legal decisions handed down by County Courts. Judgments for monetary sums are entered on the Register of County Court Judgments, which is checked by credit reference agencies to assess the credit-worthiness of individuals.

D

Daniel Todd Gilbert

Daniel Todd Gilbert (born November 5, 1957) is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is a social psychologist who is known for his research (with Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia) on affective forecasting, with a special emphasis on cognitive biases such as the impact bias. He is the author of the international bestseller Stumbling on Happiness, which has been translated into more than 25 languages and which won the 2007 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books.

E

Easterlin Paradox

The Easterlin Paradox is a key concept in happiness economics. It is named for economist Richard Easterlin who discussed the factors contributing to happiness in the 1974 paper "Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence." Easterlin found that within a given country people with higher incomes are more likely to report being happy. However, in international comparisons the average reported level of happiness does not vary much with national income per person, at least for countries with income sufficient to meet basic needs. Similarly, although income per person rose steadily in the United States between 1946 and 1970, average reported happiness showed no long-term trend and declined between 1960 and 1970.

G

Gemba

Gemba is a Japanese term meaning "the actual place" or "the real place." Japanese detectives call the crime scene gemba, and Japanese TV reporters may refer to themselves as reporting from gemba. In business, gemba is the factory floor. It can be any "site" such as a construction site, sales floor or where the service provider interacts directly with the customer.

 In lean manufacturing, the idea of gemba is that the problems are visible and the best improvement ideas will come from going to the gemba. The gemba walk, much like MBWA or Management by Walking Around, is an activity that takes management to the front lines to look for waste and opportunities to practice gemba kaizen, or practical shopfloor improvement.

In quality management, gemba means the manufacturing floor and the idea is that if a problem occurs, the engineers must go there to understand the full impact of the problem, gathering data from all sources. Unlike focus groups and surveys, gemba visits are not scripted or bound by what one wants to ask.

J

John Prendergast

John Prendergast is an author and human rights activist who, for over 25 years, has worked for peace in Africa. He is Co-Founder of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. During the Clinton administration, Prendergast was involved in a number of peace processes in Africa, while he was Director of African Affairs at the National Security Council and Special Advisor to Susan Rice at the Department of State. He has also worked for two members of the United States Congress, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Joseph Alois Schumpeter (8 February 1883 – 8 January 1950) was an Austrian economist and political scientist. He popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.

K

Keynesian economics

Keynesian economics (also called Keynesianism and Keynesian theory) is a macroeconomic theory based on the ideas of 20th century British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics argues that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes and therefore advocates active policy responses by the public sector, including monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle.  The theories forming the basis of Keynesian economics were first presented in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936; the interpretations of Keynes are contentious, and several schools of thought claim his legacy.

L

Lean manufacturing

Lean manufacturing or lean production, often simply, "Lean," is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Basically, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as "Lean" only in the 1990s. It is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world's largest automaker, has focused attention on how it has achieved this.

M

Macroeconomics

Macroeconomics (from Greek prefix "macr(o)-" meaning "large" + "economics") is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior and decision-making of the entire economy, be that a national, regional, or the global economy. With microeconomics, macroeconomics is one of the two most general fields in economics.

Microeconomics

Microeconomics (from Greek prefix micro- meaning "small" + "economics") is a branch of economics that studies how the individual parts of the economy, the household and the firms, make decisions to allocate limited resources, typically in markets where goods or services are being bought and sold. Microeconomics examines how these decisions and behaviours affect the supply and demand for goods and services, which determines prices, and how prices, in turn, determine the supply and demand of goods and services.

N

New Deal

The New Deal was a series of economic programs passed by Congress during the first term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, from 1933-1938. The programs were responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call the "3 Rs": relief, recovery and reform. That is, relief for the unemployed and poor; recovery of the economy to normal levels; and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic party the majority (as well as holding the White House for seven out of nine Presidential terms from 1933-69), with its base in liberal ideas, big city machines, and newly empowered labor unions, ethnic minorities, and the white South. The Republicans were split, either opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, or accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient. The realignment crystallized into the New Deal Coalition that dominated most American elections into the 1960s, while the opposition Conservative Coalition largely controlled Congress from 1938-1964.

S

Smart Meter

A smart meter, according to regulatory authorities, is an advanced meter (usually an electrical meter) that records consumption in intervals of an hour or less and communicates that information at least daily via some communications network back to the utility for monitoring and billing purposes (telemetering). Smart meters enable two-way communication between the meter and the central system.

Stiglitz Report

The Stiglitz Report, released by the committee in late 2009, sees the recent financial crisis as the latest and most damaging of several concurrent crises—of food, water, energy, and sustainability—that are tightly interrelated. The analysis and recommendations in the report cover the gamut from short-term mitigation to deep structural changes, from crisis response to lasting reform of the global economic and financial architecture.

U

UNCTAD

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was established in 1964 as a permanent intergovernmental body. It is the principal organ of the United Nations General Assembly dealing with trade, investment, and development issues.