Alien from another Universe-ity

Find an online news article dated within the last 12 months that discusses a government involvement in innovation. Using this information in the article provide the following information: Provide a brief background of the news article. How will this innovation help the country’s citizens and the global economy? What are the negative elements involved with the innovation? Explain why you agree or disagree with the country’s involvement with the innovation.

          As soon as I live in China, I decided that the article about this country’s government involvement in innovation will be the most interesting for me. The news article I found was posted in this February and is called “China’s local governments double down on innovation to drive growth”.

          In this article, we can see that China’s government sees innovation as a key driver of growth. This country is still recovering from its zero-COVID policy, and while some provinces are still struggling with economic issues caused by it, some others – for example, Hubei Province – could reach as much as about $789 billion GDP last year (Xinhua, 2022). And in driving growth one of the most important roles was played by high-tech industries. Therefore, local governments have high expectations from innovations and new sectors such as AI.

Compute the marginal utility.

1. Compute the marginal utility for cookie and slice of pie.

Marginal Utility = Change in Units Consumed / Change in Utility

Marginal Utility for Cookie calculation:

1) For 1 cookie, total utility and marginal utility = 18.

2) For 2 cookies, marginal utility = (34 – 18) / (2 – 1) = 16

3) For 3 cookies, marginal utility = (49 – 34) / (3 – 2) = 15

4) For 4 cookies, marginal utility = (61 – 49) / (4 – 3) = 12

4) For 5 cookies, marginal utility = (71 – 61) / (5 – 4) = 10

6) For 6 cookies, marginal utility = (79 – 71) / (6 – 5) = 8

7) For 7 cookies, marginal utility = (84 – 79) / (7 – 6) = 5

8) For 8 cookies, marginal utility = (87 – 84) / (8 – 7) = 3

Calculate the price elasticity.

1. Price elasticity of demand from point B to point C:

% change in quantity = 3500 – 2000 ÷ (3500+2000)/2 × 100 = 1500 ÷ 2750 × 100 = 54.55

% change in price = 30 – 20 ÷ (30 +20)/2 × 100 = 10/ 25 × 100 = 40

Price elasticity of demand = 54.55 ÷ 40 = 1.36

2. Classify the elasticity for point B to point C as elastic, inelastic, or unitary.

When elasticity is > 1, it is considered elastic. In our case this number is 1.36, thus the elasticity for point B to point C is elastic.

3. Explanation for the elasticity for point B to point C.

The quantity demanded increased by 54,55% when the cost was raised by 40%. Therefore, there was a great response to changes in the price. This should have happened due to other reasons than the cost – tendencies, etc.

How has the minimum wages or rent controls effected the economy of the country? Explain what the minimum wage is an example of. Discuss if you think the government should be involved in establishing laws for setting the minimum wages or rent controls.

         According to the textbook, minimum wage makes it illegal to pay less than the specified bottom hourly rate (Greenlaw & Shapiro, 2018). The minimum wage is an example of a price floor, as soon as according to the law it is the lowest level of payment which is allowed to pay. This topic is especially interesting to me, which became a reason why I have chosen the following article for this Learning Journal: “What is the minimum wage in China in 2022?”.

          This article tells us about the change in the minimum wage in more than twenty provinces in China, where base salaries raised since 2021. You can find the highest monthly living wage in Shanghai, and the highest hourly base pay in Beijing. To be honest, I was extremely surprised to see, that the minimum monthly wage in Shanghai is only RMB 2,590. I personally know many citizens of this city, and their salaries are sometimes 4 or even 6 times higher.

Explain a time in your life when you experienced opportunity cost. Why did you make the decision? What was another alternative that you could have made? Discuss how scarcity influenced your decision.

According to our textbook, the term opportunity cost is used to refer to a situation where we lose alternatives when choosing only one of them (Greenlaw & Shapiro, 2018). For me, the opportunity cost of ordering my favorite ice cream from a tiny restaurant is a plate of dumplings in another restaurant I would give up. I literally hate cooking, and with such a personality, I am lucky enough to live in China, where food delivery is usually only a tiny little bit more expensive than cooking the same dish yourself. Usually, I also do not have enough time to cook – I am a dedicated worker and hard-working student. Therefore, I often end up ordering food delivery from the nearest restaurants and stores.

For international trade, discuss your country’s absolute advantage, comparative advantage, and opportunity costs. What are the main goods or services that your country export? What are the products that your country imports? Do you think that your country can produce a particular good rather than having it imported? Explain.

Trade is very important in the modern world. Thanks to globalization, nowadays countries can enjoy a great variety of goods and services that they can import and export. However, we need to remember, that different countries have different resources and opportunities.

The country in which I live, and which will now be discussed is China. It is a well-known fact, that his country’s population is the biggest in the world. This is the reason, why China has an absolute advantage in manufacturing all kinds of products and providing all kinds of services where a huge number of employees is required. Also, China, just like Thailand and Vietnam, has an absolute advantage in producing and exporting inexpensive goods because of the low unit labor costs (MBN, n.d.). When we speak about the comparative advantage, for China it is just about the same. For example, this country has a comparative advantage in assembling iPhones (HarvardPolitics, 2013), which happens exactly because of the huge number of workforce available and relatively low prices. This helps international companies (in our example, it’s Apple Inc.) take advantage of the supply chain efficiencies to lessen their expenses.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of special interest groups within the democratic system of government? Should governments allow professional lobbyists to influence government legislation?  Why or why not? In your explanation, provide an example of an actual special interest group impacting a government policy.

            To answer this week’s questions, let’s first see what a Special Interest Group is. According to our textbook, SIGs are some societies and groups that are not too big in number compared to the whole nation, but they are well organized and focus on certain problems (Greenlaw & Shapiro, 2018). These groups have policy goals and make efforts within the political system to foster their goals.

            There are several pros and cons of Special Interest Groups within the democratic system of government. Let’s speak about the advantages first. For enhancing democracy, it is very important to not let any single interest monopolize the attention of the government. Therefore, SIGs can serve the common good by adding more voices to participate in the political process. Also, it can be difficult for the government to decide what is really important for the citizens without involving them in the process. Interest Groups create healthy competition and, therefore, produce fairness. People become more involved in politics, while political legislators become more motivated to take action.

If all countries worldwide eliminated all barriers to immigration would global economic growth increase? Why or why not? How would the labor markets impact the economic growth?

To answer this week’s questions, let’s see what immigration is first. According to Umera (n.d.), we can simply define immigration as relocating to a new area and aiming to live there. It can be another region or even another country. There are many different reasons why people immigrate, and immigration itself affects the economy so drastically, that there are lots of discussions and debates about it.

Using your own word (do not copy and paste from a website) explain one negative externality and one positive externality that is currently happening in your country. What is your country’s government doing to fix the issues of the negative externality?

          One of the well-known negative externalities is pollution, and it became a great issue in China, where environmental pollution goes hand in hand together with economic growth. For example, from 2007 to 2015, China’s GDP increased by 2.6 times while the total amount of industrial exhaust fumes emissions increased by 1.8 times (Zhao et al, 2022). Air pollution can cause several horrible effects and diseases such as lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, respiratory diseases, and many others. Therefore, this country has to combat this negative externality. For example, one of the important plans is to replace coal with natural gas. Also, to deal with this great challenge, the Chinese government created the Outline of the Healthy China 2030 plan which should not only help to improve public health but also find reasons that affect it negatively (Zhao et al, 2022).

Think back to a purchase that you made recently and respond to the following: How would you describe your thinking before you made that purchase? Did you have any budget constraints? If so, what were they? Would you have made the purchase if the price had increased? Why or why not?

          My recent important (and big) purchase was a laptop, which I’m using right now to write this Discussion Forum assignment. My previous one was still working satisfactorily, but I had to be very patient when loading something more serious than office applications. To compare with the new laptop, just imagine that Adobe Photoshop used to take 3-5 minutes to load, and now it opens immediately. Maybe for somebody, it will sound funny, but I also like to play computer games. It is my hobby, and I used to struggle a lot with modern games and other software because they did not work well and fast on my previous computer. Finally, I wanted to do some 3d modeling and animation, but my old laptop could not properly load some of the software features.