GEOG 216: Geography of the World Economy Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards generated from GEOG 216 lecture notes covering concepts of global economy, spatial organization, economic indicators, and trade theories.

Cartogram

A map display technique described as functioning like a pie chart on a map to represent geographic data visually.

Trade Openness Ratio

A quantitative measure of economic internationalization calculated as \frac{\text{Value of exports (\) + Value of imports (\)}}{\text{GDP}}.

Economic Internationalization

The extent to which national economies interact with one another through arms-length trade and the exchange of finished goods and services across borders.

Arms-Length Trade

International trade focused strictly on the exchange of final products across national borders, without direct involvement in the internal production activities within those countries.

Globalization

A qualitative and quantitative process of integration encompassing functional integration of production, information flows, capital flows, migration, and foreign direct investment (FDI).

Hyper-globalizers

Proponents of globalization (e.g., Thomas Friedman, Francis Fukuyama) who argue that national governments lose control, distance disappears, and a borderless, flat world emerges.

Skeptics

Thinkers who argue that globalization is merely a mislabeling of economic internationalization and assert that the nation-state remains the primary actor in the global economy.

Transformationalists

Perspectives holding that the global economy is experiencing structural transformations driven by migration, trade, and information flows, creating new local-global connections without a predictable endgame.

Economic Agent

An individual or group (such as a person, firm, or government) that makes consumption or production decisions to meet material needs and wants under scarcity constraints.

Economic Institution

An underlying set of social norms and rules that govern production, consumption, and trade by creating incentive structures of rewards and punishments.

Factors of Production

The essential inputs combined to produce goods and services, categorized into Land ($L$), Labour ($L$), and Capital ($K$).

Private Goods

Goods that are excludable (access can be restricted) and rivalrous (consumption by one person diminishes availability for another).

Public Goods

Goods that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, such as street lighting or national defence.

Natural Scarcity

Scarcity determined by physical availability and natural limits of a resource, such as gold or silver.

Socially-Constructed Scarcity

Scarcity created or enforced through social structures, economic institutions, or corporate mechanisms.

Productive Efficiency

The condition achieved when a market produces goods or services at the lowest possible economic cost for a given level of quality.

Allocative Efficiency

The condition achieved when scarce resources and goods are distributed to the economic agents who derive the greatest utility or best use from them.

Production Possibility Frontier (PPF)

A visual model illustrating trade-offs between two options under resource constraints; its expansion over time represents economic growth.

Spatial Organization of Production Model

A framework mapping basic economic decisions (What, How, Where, and For Whom) across inputs, factors of production, value-added processing, markets, scale, and transport services.

The Market System (Circular Flow Model)

A conceptual diagram showing how households sell factors of production to businesses in resource markets and use money income to purchase goods from businesses in product markets.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

The total market value of all finished goods and services produced within a country's geographic borders over the course of one year.

Gross National Product (GNP)

The total market value of all finished goods and services produced by the nationals or companies of a given country in a year, regardless of where the production occurs.

Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)

An economic adjustment metric that equalizes the purchasing power of different currencies using a standard basket of goods, expressed in International Dollars ($\text{INTL\$}$).

Gross National Income (GNI)

An economic measure reflecting the total income received by a country's residents, incorporating foreign aid and financial remittances.

Manufacturing Value Added (MVA)

The net economic output produced during manufacturing, calculated as the total value of manufactured output minus intermediate inputs used in production.

Mercantilism

A 15th- to 18th-century economic doctrine holding that state wealth is measured in accumulated precious metals (gold and silver), treating international trade as a zero-sum game promoted by protectionist policies.

Time-Space Compression

The process through which transportation and communication technologies accelerate transactions, altering perceptions of spatial distance and time.

Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI)

An inward-focused economic policy that transitions an economy from primary product exports to domestic manufacturing by acquiring technology, protecting infant industries, and replacing imports.

Export-Oriented Industrialization (EOI)

A economic development strategy focused on manufacturing products for global export markets through state intervention, preferential subsidies, and managed exchange rates.

Absolute Advantage

The economic ability of one country to produce a specific good or service using fewer resources or inputs than another country.

Comparative Advantage

The ability of a nation to produce a good at a lower opportunity cost relative to another nation, establishing a basis for mutually beneficial trade.