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Is Shortage the Same Things as Scarcity

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“A shortage is the same thing as scarcity.” Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Why or why not?

Business dictionary states the following: “Scarcity and shortage must be viewed with an economic eye on the problem. These terms are related to goods and services that are produced for public consumption. Both terms relate to the amount of goods and services available, but each has a very different meaning.”

Scarcity is the basic economic problem that people have because of their unlimited wants and their resources are unlimited as well. There are several economic decisions that have to be made in order to allocate the resources efficiently. An example of scarcity would be oil. Oil is considered scarce because it comes from developing countries and it is very price competitive. This drives the prices for the oil to be at all time highs because of its limited amount. Shortage is the demand for a product or service that exceeds the total available supply. Shortages are caused by miscalculated demand or perhaps under produced demand on purpose. An example of a shortage would be a video game. During the holiday season a company introduces a new video game that they only made a supply of 1,000,000 copies. Within the continental U.S. and other countries they must provide each retail store that sells the product with a limited amount of copies. This makes consumers stand or sleep outside retail stores for hours just to be the one the few to get the video game. Scarcity and shortage are synonyms with different meanings. As you can see how easily the two can be confused with one another. In the study of economics scarcity will always exist but a shortage can be fixed. I will definitely have to disagree with the statement of scarcity and shortage being the same thing.

Reference
Miller, R. (2012). Economics Today (16th ed.). Boston: Pearson Addison-Wesley http://business.yourdictionary.com/articles/what-is-the-difference-between-scarcity-and shortage.html

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