Arthur Cecil Pigou in the context of "Pigou effect"

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⭐ Core Definition: Arthur Cecil Pigou

Arthur Cecil Pigou (/ˈpɡ/; 18 November 1877 – 7 March 1959) was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly served on several public committees, including the Cunliffe Committee and the 1919 Royal Commission on income tax.

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👉 Arthur Cecil Pigou in the context of Pigou effect

In economics, the Pigou effect is the stimulation of output and employment caused by increasing consumption due to a rise in real balances of wealth, particularly during deflation. The term was named after Arthur Cecil Pigou by Don Patinkin in 1948.

Real wealth was defined by Arthur Cecil Pigou as the summation of the money supply and government bonds divided by the price level. He argued that Keynes' General Theory was deficient in not specifying a link from "real balances" to current consumption and that the inclusion of such a "wealth effect" would make the economy more "self correcting" to drops in aggregate demand than Keynes predicted. Because the effect derives from changes to the "Real Balance", this critique of Keynesianism is also called the Real Balance effect.

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Arthur Cecil Pigou in the context of Externality

In economics, an externality is a cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's (or parties') activity. Externalities can be considered as unpriced components that are involved in either consumer or producer consumption. Air pollution from motor vehicles is one example. The cost of air pollution to society is not paid by either the producers or users of motorized transport. Water pollution from mills and factories are another example. All (water) consumers are made worse off by pollution but are not compensated by the market for this damage.

The concept of externality was first developed by Alfred Marshall in the 1890s and achieved broader attention in the works of economist Arthur Pigou in the 1920s. The prototypical example of a negative externality is environmental pollution. Pigou argued that a tax, equal to the marginal damage or marginal external cost, (later called a "Pigouvian tax") on negative externalities could be used to reduce their incidence to an efficient level. Subsequent thinkers have debated whether it is preferable to tax or to regulate negative externalities, the optimally efficient level of the Pigouvian taxation, and what factors cause or exacerbate negative externalities, such as providing investors in corporations with limited liability for harms committed by the corporation.

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