micro-economics

While some books, such as "The Entrepreneurial Mindset" and my own "Thinking Like An Entrepreneur," are great at providing philosophical guidance and strategic insight into becoming an entrepreneur, other books are great at providing practical, hands-on information for dealing with specific, small business situations. "Business Know-How" provides excellent, hands-on information which will help you run your small or home business.

"Business Know-How" is jam-packed with hints, tips, resources, and suggestions for saving money, growing your sales, and running your business more effectively. The lessons are particularly useful to small and home-based businesses.

Half of U.S. small businesses are home-based. Attard says that although hard work and good products are necessary to succeed in small business, hard work and good products alone aren't enough. Attard writes: "To be successful, you need to know how to do business. You need to know the best ways to find customers, to sell to them, to use technology, to cut costs, and to deal with problems that inevitably arise. And you need to know how to do it all on a shoestring."

The First Chapter, Finding the Real Opportunities, will help you generate ideas for a new business. Attard suggests: "Businesses don't just happen. They are made... your success relies on what you bring to the business. If you love what you do, your passion for the business will drive you to be knowledgeable, creative, and persistent."

One of Attard's recommendations is "Look for Avalanches" which will help carry you in a successful direction. As an example, Attard discusses Cheyenne Software, which jumped on the Local Area Network trend by developing enhancements to Novell LANs. She also discusses demographic trends and points out a few particularly lucrative areas, such as corporate training. We learn that corporate training is a $50 billion market.

We also learn that African Americans represented a $300 billion market by 1994. Attard advises: "The secret to successfully targeting these and other cultural markets is to pay attention to your audience's heritage and lifestyle. Don't just replace pictures of white people with pictures of African Americans or Latinos, and don't translate English word for word into any other language. Your marketing efforts will fail if you do. Instead, tailor the sales literature or ads to accurately reflect the lifestyle of the targeted market."

But, your business doesn't need to be earth shattering or target a huge market. One of Attard's first businesses was making beanbags shaped like frogs. Attard writes: "I filled them with birdseed instead of beans to make them pliable and less lumpy to the touch. ... I could produce them quickly and kept my costs low by making the frogs from inexpensive fabric remains."

Attard also suggests considering "Mundane Moneymakers," such as home cleaning or plumbing for your start-up business. Attard writes: "The key to making money with the mundane is to sell something your customers can't do, don't want to do, don't have the time to do, or can't get done elsewhere."

As a great example of a mundane, but potentially profitable, business, Attard tells us about a doggy do-do clean-up business which cleans up doggy waste in dog owners' back yards. Now, there's a good example of an unromantic business! After a few years, the founding entrepreneur sold the company for a quarter of a million dollars.

(Passion for doggy clean-up probably doesn't last too long. Attard doesn't say how big a market doggy do-do clean-up represents. But with the help of her outstanding chapter on business research, you probably could make a fairly good estimate. Exercise for Entrepreneurship students: Estimate the market size of the doggy do-do business. Extra credit: Measure the market size in Kibbels N' Bits.)

Most of "Business Know-How" isn't about starting a business. It's about operating your business effectively.

One money saving tip from Business Know-How's Chapter, Keeping the Tax Collector at Bay, is "Employ Your Spouse and Deduct the Entire Amount of Your Medical Insurance Premiums."

Because there are limitations on the tax deductibility of medical insurance premiums providing coverage to sole proprietors and S-corporation owners who hold more than 2% of the corporate shares, but no such deductibility limits on health insurance coverage provided to your other employees, Attard suggests employing your spouse.

Attard writes: "There are no such limitations on the deductibility of medical insurance premiums you make on behalf of your employees, however. If your spouse is an employee of your business, the business can pay for (and deduct the cost of) his or her medical insurance. Your spouse would then add you as a dependent on his or her policy. This would make the entire premium deductible by your business as a business expense. If you don't have employees other than your spouse, and don't have any other good source of health insurance, this strategy offers significant tax savings by converting a personal expense to a [tax deductible] business expense."

Attard notes one important caveat. If you have other employees, you might be required by law to provide them the same health care coverage as your spouse.

"Business Know-How" has outstanding chapters about conducting business research, finding suppliers, shoestring marketing, selling to the government, home office equipment, and dealing with taxation of your home-based business. A primary focus of the book is saving money and reducing your costs, which is crucial to success. The book also provides a wealth of referrals to gather more information.

Peter Hupalo, Author of "Thinking Like An Entrepreneur."

This is a must have business book to add to your shelf. It has very practical simple advise that you will want to start implementing right away.

Janet Attard's Business Know-How tells how to make a small business profitable, from obtaining publicity and locating customers without expensive ad budgets to cutting business costs and becoming involved with the Internet. All are excellent business guides with practical information for those just starting out.

This book salvaged me for AP Micro and Macro. I had a teacher who was teaching AP Econ for the first time, so I knew I needed a review guide. I picked up the Princeton Review, and it helped me get a 4 and a 5 (the 4 was due to labor markets---in my opinion, one of the hardest concepts of AP Micro).

I originally bought this book to prepare myself for the AP economics. I did not took AP exam though, because I ran out of time studying for other AP's.

So I ended up taking Econ class in college. Whenever my iffy textbook confuses me I read this book. It has been helping me tremendously! It is a great book with the essential Economics nailed in it.

Scored a 70 or 99th percentile! Studied off and on for a month. Download the CLEP questions from the Collegeboard site and you are ready to go!!!!!

We don't have economics at my school, but it's my intended college major.

Using THIS BOOK ALONE, I made note cards, went over them, and got a 4 on the Micro exam in my junior year. If I'd put in a little more effort, I'd have gotten a 5 (didn't begin studying until mid-April). I'm going to take the Macro this May.

There is a really clear review of all the concepts you need to know, presented exactly as they will appear on the test. It's concise, straightforward, and explicates the necessary graphs. For extra Free Reponse practice, check the AP website.

I'd strongly recommend it.

Roger LeRoy Miller has improved the quality of Economics today from last year. The book is very resourceful and if used for a class, no student will do poorly in the class. The definitions and data are presented clearly. Economics Today looks at the economy of today and of the past and shows what is beneficial for the economy and what is not. This excellent book has helped me learn all the content and leaning me to consider a major in economics.

18 CASE STUDIES TRACKED OVER A PERIOD OF 10 YEARS TO ANALYSE HOW DEGREE OF MARKET COMPETITION INFLUENCES COUNTERVAILING POWER OF INSTITUTIONS. THE ONLY WORK OF ITS KIND TO DATE

Few authors takes a genuine look at Marx in terms of modern (postmodern) thought like Jason Read does in this work. Most authors stumble in this capacity, unable to admit that they themselves are a product of their historical context. Here we view Marx with the benefit of modern theory, and not this de-contextualization that most authors seem to want to put us through. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Marx.

The story of the Grameen bank is an excellent example of how social change initiatives can be combined with government and private industry support to acheive a greater outcome than the organization could acheive by itself. Yunus provides an excellent chronicle of his bank's formation as well as explaining its principles. Highly recommended for anyone interested in social entrepreneurship or social change. The only shortcomings are: 1) as a finance person, I would like to have read more about the operational side of the banks relative to their commercial competitors - what specific factors enabled them to be so successful (other than the broad social factors he identifies)? 2) Need more information about how these types of programs can be applied to industrialized nations such as the US.

If you know the story of Grameen Bank, and wanted to know more about the founder - I don't need to say anymore.

If you haven't heard of Grameen, prepare yourself to learn about a bank which has overturned the conventional wisdom about helping people who live in poverty.

Yunus' big idea can be put very simply: people who live on less than $1 per day (3 billion people) don't need to be tought how to feed themselves and survive - the very fact that they are alive is testament to their abilities.

His approach rests upon that faith in people's ability to help themselves, if given access to the very small amounts of loan capital they need to start a profitable venture - whether that is weaving cloth or repairing bicycles.

The road to reaching more than 2 million people in Bangladesh, and many other millions worldwide, wasn't smooth. What you get from reading this book is a sense that sometimes the 'homegrown' solution beats the 'imposed' ideas from the developed world.

A challenging book for liberals and conservatives alike!

In 1983 Yunus established a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with small loans, aiming to help the poor by supporting them with his own enterprise. Yunus' small loans paid off big time, and this provides a review of his theories of small loan impacts on the lives of third world peoples. An intriguing, important guide packed with ramifications for all.

i also have another few books of this write and this writer is simply great to present us his ideas

David Colander's Microeconomics is possibly the best introductory book to Microeconomics. He provides practical examples, as well as allows his own personal quirks and the like to show through, thus avoiding the monotony of traditional textbooks. Also contains color illustrations to help in the understanding (and the illustrations ARE helpful!).

This is a great text for an intro to Microeconomics (I used this book when I was student). It was written clearly by stating the points that the author hopes you learn, followed by the reading and then exercises and problems to make sure the student understood the concepts from the chapter. The many graphs in this book make the concepts easy to understand and the fact that most of the graphs are in color helps out alot.

It's a great book for first year business students and all those who want to learn something about basic principles of macroeconomics and the influence it has on everyday business activities

In comparison with other macroeconomic texts around it should get 5 stars. It starts with a historical perspective of the crisis in economics at the time of Keynes, setting the picture for why anyone bothered to invent macroeconomics in the first place. It then rapidly proceeds to introduce the major schools of macroeconomics and to develop the relevant ideas and models. It is an ideal introduction for the interested or serious student and manages to be exciting as well as fairly comprehensive. If you're taking an introductory macroeconomics course, get this book instead of your text. If you're coming from outside the economics profession and have a mind of your own, this ones for you.

This is a classic Macro text used for many Intro to Macro-Econ.

I used a similiar text (many editions before) when I took my first econ class in college over 10 yrs ago.

This is a great book, easy to understand and fluid reading.

Thumbs Up!!!

Oversimplified once again, and with some serious errors, especially on one question on comparative advantage where they've reversed the numerator and denominator of a fraction. My friends who were unfortunate enough to buy this as their review for AP Econ found themselves completely confused and having wasted so much time on mistakes in the book. The review wasn't particularly comprehensive or in-depth, there were blatant errors (mentioned in other reivews), and the tests again were easy compared to the AP exam...never a good thing for test prep books.

While the Princeton Review books are usually not that great and oversimplified (except for the SAT I book), the AP Econ book is a really good one, perhaps because the exam itself is one of the easiest AP exams. I am home schooled and self-studied AP Econ with my brother's old HS textbook and this and got a 5 on both parts in May 2001.

The book is an easy read: big words, few pages. Yet if you understand every page of the book, you'll do fine on the exam.

But as with all AP exams, I *highly recommend* that you get a hold of the past exams and do them. They truly help. After doing the old tests, I learned that there are a few things that this book failed to cover enough of:

--allocative efficiency --externalities and social benefit, etc. --the GDP cycle diagram thing. The book tells you to memorize it, but the figure they show you is oversimplified.

Also, as mentioned in another review, they've made serious errors in the Keynesian vs. Monetary policy part. Precisely, it's the part where they give the arrows (e.g. when r goes down, i goes up, y goes up, etc. etc.). Some of the arrows are reversed. So be wary of that. There are also a few minor mistakes in the book that are pretty easy to catch but won't harm you.

The new edition of this book is available (...). It has everything from the first edition plus some new material and bug fixes.