Jacob Solomon's group - M2015(B)

The author discusses the problem of shortage and other negative effects caused by regulating prices. He also charaterize people who argue that price controls are beneficial. The society, according to Art Carden, determines whether to use aforementioned regulations or not, and therefore should not be proud of making utopian schemes that in reality are detrimental.

This article shows us that Venezuela wants to introduce a maximum price for electronics, hardware and clothing

In Venezuela, the president Nicolas Maduro has extended price controls to prevent the inflation that is (against) support for his rule. "We can't allow our hard currency to be used to rob people through the sale of these goods." he harangued businessmen he accuses of usury. This article relates to price controls and politics, and shows how price controls might look like when a country is ruled by dictatorship.

This is present event which is highly connected with price controls. The Venezuelan President is supporter of this policy and even used army to make sellers low their price. The sellers of electronics wanted to increase the prices due to the fact of inflation.

This article discusses the fact that whether high taxes may keep unemployment rates low or not. It relates to what we studied because we discussed the effects of Taxes and unemployment is one.

This article talks about how buyers of coffee in Vietnam are dodging to pay the excise tax plaxed on coffee.

This article relates to subsidies since the government of Morocco has raised energy prices to save subsidy money that is needed for the International Monetary Fund requirements. Protests have been made from the government's junior partner party over the raise in price of energy. Higher taxes for energy will cause higher price for transportation for tourists and higher costs of production for agriculture. The government though, said they will return parts of the increase of energy prices for professional drivers to avoid a "snowball" effect on prices. But is the raise in price of energy due to the save of subsidy money rational for the country, looking upon the people's use of energy and the agriculture?

This article tells us about how China will soon be experimenting granting farmers loans to help them in producing more food. With more farmers being able to borrow money they can turn that money into profit by harvesting and selling sugar, cotton, soy and corn

In this article the problem about rising the fuel prices with about 33% is talked about. The reason to why the government has decided to do this is because it "will reduce the government's ballooning fuel subsidy which has been a major drain on resources". Instead, the new budget includes money to about 15 million families, most of them are poor.

This is an article that appeared lately in The Economist. It considers gas taxation in order to fund roads. It gives the factor that we discussed during classes: substitutes to gasoline, PED, the influence on the environment.

This is a very interesting criticism of taxes imposed on things that affect our health negatively posted by Adam Smith institute. As these particular taxes raise many controversies, I think it is worth reading.

this article is very interesting. It illustrates how the government could affect the private business. This could be by imposing taxes on them. This article is talking about the American Federal government. In this case, the government is imposing more and more taxes which is increasing the cost on businesses. This affects negatively their ability to supply and global combativeness. What i also liked about the article, is the amount of measured data it contains. there are many numbers that help you understand what happened and what will happen.

this article shows use of instruments that are in the hands of government. government in Indonesia imposed excise on petrol which is very common example of good with inelastic price elasticity of demand. The possible reason is that petrol is essential good. moreover, they want to use money gained from higher excise to give subsidies for the poorer households.

This article talks about how voters in the Colorado state have voted to approve 'proposition AA' which imposes a 15 percent excise tax and an initial 10 percent sales tax on recreational marijuana. If proposition AA approves it it predicted to bring in $67 million a year. This shows how the government can put such a high excise tax on inelastic goods and people will still be willing to pay for it.

This article is about the effects of taxes on tobacco for the government, especially concerning the profit.

I choose this article as I found that It demonstrates all the consequences of a price control and from different points of view. In this case, the government set a maximum price. A lot of the citizens were very happy, as they can now afford what they couldn't before, however, with time, they started to realise that the products are disappearing from shelves. The reason is that with the lower price, demand has increased and suppliers can't supply more. The suppliers were affected by this price control too. They are not able to pay their costs any more, and profit made is very little. If the government doesn't take another action to fix what they did, they will have a bigger problem than food being expensive, which is food not exciting due to most groceries closing after not being able to make profits. 

I think this article was appropriate for our task, since most of the article was about opportunity cost, if we should spend our money on fixing the future. This subject (the environment) can be seen as an opportunity cost since we choose to venture our money on the environment for the future, even though we might not will take part of the advantages now, for the moment.

This article is a good example of scarcity I believe because, it shows that there is a huge demand for robotic self-driving cars or in other words, they are scarce. This leads to many companies like google or Tesla starting to develope self-driving cars because they know that due to the scarcity of the product, they can charge big amounts of money and make a huge profit.

This is an interesting article that talks about how scarcity can really badger with people's mind. It also talks about how it makes us as people, focus. I think this is because we need scarcity to be able to achieve our goals to make the resources we want easier for us to get. This article mentions the phycological research done by Prof. Shafir collaborating with an economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan to write ' Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much '. It is an interesting read.