Economists in the context of The Calculus of Consent

Import substitution industrialization (ISI) is a protectionist trade and economic policy that advocates replacing foreign imports with domestic production. It is based on the premise that a country should attempt to reduce its foreign dependency through the local production of industrialized products. The term primarily refers to 20th-century development economics policies, but it has been advocated since the 18th century by economists such as Friedrich List and Alexander Hamilton.

ISI policies have been enacted by developing countries with the intention of producing development and self-sufficiency by the creation of an internal market. The state leads economic development by nationalization, subsidization of manufacturing, increased taxation, and highly protectionist trade policies. In the context of Latin American development, the term "Latin American structuralism" refers to the era of import substitution industrialization in many Latin American countries from the 1950s to the 1980s. The theories behind Latin American structuralism and ISI were organized in the works of economists such as Raúl Prebisch, Hans Singer, and Celso Furtado, and gained prominence with the creation of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC or CEPAL). They were influenced by a wide range of Keynesian, communitarian, and socialist economic thought, as well as dependency theory.

In trade, barter (derived from bareter) is a system of exchange in which participants in a transaction directly exchange goods or services for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. Barter is considered one of the earliest systems of economic exchange, used before the invention of money. Economists usually distinguish barter from gift economies in many ways; barter, for example, features immediate reciprocal exchange, not one delayed in time. Barter usually takes place on a bilateral basis, but may be multilateral (if it is mediated through a trade exchange). In most developed countries, barter usually exists parallel to monetary systems only to a very limited extent. Market actors use barter as a replacement for money as the method of exchange in times of monetary crisis, such as when currency becomes unstable (such as hyperinflation or a deflationary spiral) or simply unavailable for conducting commerce.

No ethnographic studies have shown that any present or past society has used barter without any other medium of exchange or measurement, and anthropologists have found no evidence that money emerged from barter. Nevertheless, economists since the times of Adam Smith (1723–1790) often imagined pre-modern societies for the sake of showing how the inefficiency of barter explains the emergence of money and the economy, and hence the discipline of economics itself.

In economics, profit is the difference between revenue that an economic entity has received from its outputs and total costs of its inputs, also known as "surplus value". It is equal to total revenue minus total cost, including both explicit and implicit costs.

It is different from accounting profit, which only relates to the explicit costs that appear on a firm's financial statements. An accountant measures the firm's accounting profit as the firm's total revenue minus only the firm's explicit costs. An economist includes all costs, both explicit and implicit costs, when analyzing a firm. Therefore, economic profit is smaller than accounting profit.

City region is a term used by urbanists, economists and urban planners to refer to how one or more core cities are linked to a hinterland by functional ties, such as economic, housing-market, commuting, marketing or retail catchment factors. This concept emphasizes the importance of these functional relationships in understanding urban areas and their surrounding regions, often providing more insightful perspectives than the arbitrary boundaries assigned to administrative bodies.

Mainstream economics is the body of knowledge, theories, and models of economics, as taught by universities worldwide, that are generally accepted by economists as a basis for discussion. Also known as orthodox economics, it can be contrasted to heterodox economics, which encompasses various schools or approaches that are only accepted by a minority of economists.

The economics profession has traditionally been associated with neoclassical economics. However, this association has been challenged by prominent historians of economic thought including David Colander. They argue the current economic mainstream theories, such as game theory, behavioral economics, industrial organization, information economics, and the like, share very little common ground with the initial axioms of neoclassical economics.

Values scales are psychological inventories used to determine the values that people endorse in their lives. They facilitate the understanding of both work and general values that individuals uphold. In addition, they assess the importance of each value in people's lives and how the individual strives toward fulfillment through work and other life roles, such as parenting. Most scales have been normalized and can therefore be used cross-culturally for vocational, marketing, and counseling purposes, yielding unbiased results. Psychologists, political scientists, economists, and others interested in defining values, use values scales to determine what people value, and to evaluate the ultimate function or purpose of values.