Business Economics / Бзнес-экономика

PREFACE
You are about to embark on what we hope will be an interesting, stimulating, and informative course of study in business economics. Since you have chosen this book the authors have an obligation to give you a brief account of its genesis and its motivation. We will defer telling you what the book contains and how you can use the book to make the most of it until the Introduction below.
The authors have for several years been involved in teaching business economics to postgraduate business school students (chiefly taking the MBA degree programme). The brief given to us by the programme director has been to design a course in business economics that is integrated with, and provides the foundations for, a companion course in business policy. Together we call these General and Strategic Management.
A conventional microeconomics principles course does not fit this bill, yet we believe strongly that the analytical approach taken by economists must remain at the core of any good strategic policy programme. To use some jargon that will be discussed later in the book, one of the core competencies of any good business strategy analyst is the analytical approach used in economics.
This belief has gained some credence in European and American business schools. In recent years the business policy/strategy literature has developed a more rigorous economic foundation but this is not yet apparent in most business economics texts. The text intends to fill this gap. In seeking to do this, the authors have adopted the following principles in writing this book.
the text should not be unreasonably long, given the time constraints of MBA and similar courses;
the book should not focus on analytical technique per se;
material covered in business economics courses should be linked to business organization and policy issues studied elsewhere in business school programmes;
the text should be amenable and attractive to students completely new to economics and to those already familiar with economics.
What Makes This Text Distinctive?
Although you may have had little or no exposure to other texts, we believe you will be interested to know what (we hope) makes this text distinctive. First, there is the scope of the book. The text covers the basic analytical principles of economics of markets and business, supply and demand, costs, competition and monopoly, and public policy. But it also incorporates into this presentation of principles a wide-ranging discussion of non-standard issues: the nature and objectives of the enterprise, entrepreneurship, transactions costs, rents, sustainable competitive advantage, corporate architecture, corporate governance, the market for corporate control, diversification, and acquisition.
Secondly, the philosophy of the book is distinctive. Right from the outset we define economics as being about the search for value creation or added value. Thus we look at the market mechanism as a means of co-ordinating the search for value, and the firm as an organization created to search for, exploit, and protect opportunities to add value. Added value or rent generation is designated as the driving force of economic activity, in preference to the more usual idea of profit maximization. This accords well with the current business strategy and business policy literature which is now organized around these concepts. Thirdly, our text offers a novel and useful outline of macroeconomic issues. At all times, our consideration of macroeconomics is constrained by what is thought to be useful to those interested in business policy. We avoid a convoluted theoretical presentation, using a supply and demand oriented approach which follows on from the techniques studied in the first part of the text. Our view is that managers may find it useful to have some acquaintance with economic forecasting using leading indicators, and so this is included in the text.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank our wives, Val Perman and Janice Scouller, for their patience during the writing of this book. Virginia Williams did a superb job copy-editing the manuscript, for which we are very grateful. Our thanks also go to Ruth Marshall and her colleagues at Oxford University Press for the efficiency with which they executed the conversion of the manuscript into book form.
ROGER PERMAN
JOHN SCOULLER