Name: Google on a Surface Class: International Trade 10 1 Economy is an ancient topic, which can be traced back to Aristotle's time in the west and Confucius' time in China. However, if the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776 is regarded as the symbol of the birth of economics, it is only 200 years old. What is economics? There are various answers to the definition of this concept. For example, economics discusses what goods to produce, how to produce them and for whom. Samuelson wrote in his famous book Economics: "Economics studies how society uses scarce resources to produce valuable goods and distribute them among different people." In the book Management Economics, I pointed out from the perspectives of fairness and efficiency, production and distribution, etc., "Economics is a social science that studies how to allocate economic resources effectively and how to distribute national wealth fairly to meet personal or social goals." To sum up, all kinds of arguments are inseparable from the thinking that economics is to make limited resources use in the most reasonable way, so as to increase the total wealth of society and make society more and more affluent. This understanding of economics has three meanings: first, the purpose or desire of individuals or society is endless, while economic resources are limited and scarce in absolute sense. Due to the rapid increase of population, the adjustment and development of industry and agriculture, and the increasingly serious pollution, renewable resources such as forests and groundwater and non-renewable resources such as minerals are increasingly scarce, and even air and river water that were once considered inexhaustible have become scarce due to pollution. Second, although scarce resources have various uses, once they are used for one purpose, they cannot be used for other purposes. Therefore, people's economic activities all involve the question of choice. Here, efficiency means that a country's economy should organize its production and consumption units, so that society can obtain the largest number of needed goods and services, and make full use of economic resources within the scope of existing customs, laws and systems. Third, under the goal of maximizing social welfare, we can seek a fair distribution scheme through systems such as "equal opportunity" or "equal result". Under the condition of market economy, the prosperity brought by competition will be realized through the rules of fair game with equal opportunities. In just over 200 years, economics has established its own logical system of language and writing according to scientific norms. A set of initial concepts, a set of axioms, precise definitions and strict logic, so that people without professional training can rarely understand economic papers, especially those without a certain mathematical foundation, let alone expect to understand papers in authoritative economic academic journals. Economics has become the "Chun Xue" of human society, and it is difficult to popularize it to ordinary people. At the turn of the century, economic reform has become a global popular trend of thought. With the transformation of the original planned economy country to the market economy system, this trend of thought has increasingly become a universal social action. Learning, researching, imparting and applying economics has become an important aspect of this social action. Economists study economics seriously, practice economics boldly, spare no effort to spread economics, and provide a large number of economic management talents for economic construction. They have become or are becoming the main body of the cross-century market economy. Nearly 100 colleges and universities in China offer economic management majors, which provide a large number of talents for the construction of market economy. The painstaking research and in-depth discussion of economic theory by various research institutions at all levels has greatly enriched the treasure house of economic theory, pointed out the direction and provided theoretical basis for China's economic construction.