Midterm 1 material Flashcards
Define: Public policy analysis
the process of assessing, and deciding among alternatives in public choices based on their usefulness in satisfying one or more social goals or values
Define: Economics
the study of how society allocates scarce resources
Define: Scarcity
if a good/service were offered to people at no cost, more would be wanted than is available
Define: Trade-off
the situation when something must be given up to obtain something valued.; “no free lunch”
Define: Descriptive (positive) analysis
“what was, what is, what will be” ; concerned with causality; understanding how the world works
Define: Prescriptive (normative) analysis
“what should be”; concerned with optimal outcomes (efficiency) and sometimes equity
Define: Environmental economics
the application of economic principles to the study of how scarce environmental resources are (descriptive) and should be (prescriptive) managed.
