Land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship: These are four generally recognized factors of production. Of course, in a literal sense anything contributing to the productive process is a factor of production. However, economists seek to classify all...

Factors of production, or (in more modern terminology) ‘inputs’, are the things which are used in the process of producing goods or services. An early typology of inputs was provided by Jean-Baptiste Say, whose classification separately...

Production functions and cost functions are the cornerstones of the economic analysis of production. A production function is a mathematical relationship that captures the essential features of the technology by means of which an organization...

The economic analysis of environmental issues, especially exhaustible resources, energy and pollution. As early as 1866 JEVONS, in writing of an impending coal shortage, applied economic reasoning to the study of resources. However, it was particularly...

An input to a productive process producing a good or service. Before the eighteenth century it was common to classify all factors as either land or labour; later, CAPITAL and the ENTREPRENEUR were considered as separate factors of production. In many...

In economic theory, the various schools of economics aggregate what they consider to be the essential elements of production into broad classifications. These classifications have come to be referred to as factors of production. The number and...