ABSTRACT
Economic development is undoubtedly a prerequisite for sustainable development, especially for poorer nations and disadvantaged communities whose well-being is dependent on increased access to resources for both consumption and investment. The economics of business has generally been taken to be synonymous with financial performance. The chapter provides the beginnings of an analytical framework and proposes two principal sets of considerations—domains of impact and impact pathways. Large companies may also have an identifiable effect on macro-economic indicators such as a country's exchange rate, balance of payments, level of inflation and so on. The study of economics is traditionally about how people use scarce resources to satisfy society's many wants. Scarcity of resources means that people have to make choices between competing wants, individually and collectively. A business may be very profitable by behaving monopolistically, which in turn may have a negative economic effect in terms of both resource-use efficiency and overall human welfare.
