Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers can legally pay their employees—the price floor below which employees may not sell their labor. Most countries had introduced minimum wage legislation by the end of the 20th century. Because minimum wages increase the cost of labor, companies often try to avoid minimum wage laws by using gig workers, by moving labor to locations with lower or nonexistent minimum wages, or by automating job functions. Minimum wage policies can vary significantly between countries or even within a country, with different regions, sectors, or age groups having their own minimum wage rates. These variations are often influenced by factors such as the cost of living, regional economic conditions, and industry-specific factors.
Walmart Inc. is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas. The company was founded by brothers Sam and James "Bud" Walton in nearby Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 and incorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law on October 31, 1969. It also owns and operates Sam's Club retail warehouses.
Samuel Moore Walton was an American business magnate best known for founding the retailers Walmart and Sam's Club, which he started in Rogers, Arkansas and Midwest City, Oklahoma in 1962 and 1983 respectively. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. grew to be the world's largest corporation by revenue as well as the biggest private employer in the world. For a period of time, Walton was the richest person in the United States. His family has remained the richest family in the U.S. for several consecutive years, with a net worth of around US$240.6 billion as of January 2022. In 1992 at the age of 74, Walton died of blood cancer and was laid to rest at the Bentonville Cemetery in his longtime home of Bentonville, Arkansas.
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor, born Káldor Miklós, was a Cambridge economist in the post-war period. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons (1939), derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. Both Myrdal and Kaldor examine circular relationships, where the interdependencies between factors are relatively strong, and where variables interlink in the determination of major processes. Gunnar Myrdal got the concept from Knut Wicksell and developed it alongside Nicholas Kaldor when they worked together at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Myrdal concentrated on the social provisioning aspect of development, while Kaldor concentrated on demand-supply relationships to the manufacturing sector. Kaldor also coined the term "convenience yield" related to commodity markets and the so-called theory of storage, which was initially developed by Holbrook Working.
Sir John Richard Hicks was a British economist. He is considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS–LM model (1937), which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital (1939) significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.
The American multinational retail chain Walmart has been criticized by many groups and individuals, such as labor unions and small-town advocates, for its policies and business practices, and their effects. Criticisms include charges of racial and gender discrimination, foreign product sourcing, anti-competitive practices, treatment of product suppliers, environmental practices, the use of public subsidies, and its surveillance of its employees. The company has denied any wrongdoing and said that low prices are the result of efficiency.
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is a 2005 documentary film by director Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. The film presents a negative picture of Walmart's business practices through interviews with former employees, small business owners, and footage of Walmart executives. Greenwald also uses statistics interspersed between interview footage, to provide an objective analysis of the effects Walmart has on individuals and communities.
Walmarting or Walmartization is a neologism referring to U.S. discount department store Walmart with three meanings. The first use is similar to the concept of globalization and is used pejoratively by critics and neutrally by businesses seeking to emulate Walmart's success. The second, pejorative, use refers to the homogenization of the retail sector because of those practices. The third, neutral, use refers to the act of actually shopping at Walmart.
Working Families for Walmart is an advocacy group formed by Walmart and the Edelman public relations firm on December 20, 2005. It has been used to praise Walmart in a show of opposition to union-funded groups such as Wake Up Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch. The group is financially supported by Walmart and is headquartered in Edelman's Washington, D.C. office. It is not organized as a non-profit, and is not required to disclose its sources of funding.
Walmart Watch, formed in the spring of 2005, was a joint project of the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, a nonprofit organization studying the impact of large corporations on society, and its advocacy arm, Five Stones. The Walmart Watch group was based in Washington with the claimed goal to challenge Walmart to become a better employer, neighbor, and corporate citizen in order to improve the wages, health benefits, and treatment of workers.
The history of Walmart, an American discount department store chain, began in 1950 when businessman Sam Walton purchased a store from Luther E. Harrison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and opened Walton's 5 & 10. The Walmart chain proper was founded in 1962 with a single store in Rogers, expanding inside Oklahoma by 1968 and throughout the rest of the Southern United States by the 1980s, ultimately operating a store in every state of the United States, plus its first stores in Canada, by 1995. The expansion was largely fueled by new store construction, although the chains Mohr-Value and Kuhn's Big K were also acquired.
Nelson Lichtenstein is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is a labor historian who has written also about 20th-century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.
Various effects of migration have been an area of study and debate amongst economists. Researchers have studied questions including: if migrants hurt wages for natives; what is their tax contribution/burden; what are the effects of the money migrants send home (remittances); and how does the loss of workers affect the sender country.
Retailing in India is one of the pillars of its economy and accounts for about 10 percent of its GDP. The Indian retail market is estimated to be worth $1.3 trillion as of 2022. India is one of the fastest growing retail markets in the world, with 1.4 billion people.
The Lost Decades is a lengthy period of economic stagnation in Japan precipitated by the asset price bubble's collapse beginning in 1990. The singular term Lost Decade originally referred to the 1990s, but the 2000s and the 2010s have been included by commentators as the phenomenon continued.
Michael J. Hicks is the George & Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and Professor of Economics at Ball State University.
The economic impact of illegal immigrants in the United States is challenging to measure, and politically contentious. Research shows that undocumented immigrants increase the size of the U.S. economy/contribute to economic growth, enhance the welfare of natives, receive more in tax revenue than they contribute, reduce American firms' incentives to offshore jobs and import foreign-produced goods, and benefit consumers by reducing the prices of goods and services.
Carl Douglas McMillon is an American businessman, and the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Walmart Inc. He sits on the retailer's board of directors. Having first joined the company as a summer associate in high school, he became the company's fifth CEO in 2014. He previously led the company's Sam's Club division, from 2005 to 2009, and Walmart International, from 2009 to 2013.
Stephen Jonathan Machin is a British economist and professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). Moreover, he is currently director of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) and is a fellow of the British Academy, the Society of Labor Economists and the European Economic Association. His current research interests include labour market inequality, the economics of education, and the economics of crime.
