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the firms, it will be called product method. At C, measuring the sum total of all factor payments will be called income method. Observe that the aggregate spending of the economy must be equal to the aggregate income earned by the factors of production (the flows are equal at A and C). Now let us suppose that at a particular period of time the households decide to spend more on the goods and services produced by the firms. For the time being let us ignore the question where they would find the money to finance that extra spending since they are already spending all of their income (they may have borrowed the money to finance the additional spending). Now if they spend more on the goods and services, the firms will produce more goods and services to meet this extra demand. Since they will produce more, the firms must also pay the factors of production extra remunerations. How much extra amount of money will the firms pay? The additional factor payments must be equal to the value of the additional goods and services that are being produced. Thus the households will eventually get the extra earnings required to support the initial additional spending that they had undertaken. In other words, the households can decide to spend more – spend beyond their means. And in the end their income will rise exactly by the amount which is necessary to carry out the extra spending. Putting it differently, an economy may decide to spend more than the present level of income. But by doing so, its income will eventually rise to a level consistent with the higher spending level. This may seem a little paradoxical at first. But since income is moving in a circular fashion, it is not difficult to figure out that a rise in the flow at one point must eventually lead to a rise in the flow at all levels. This is one more example of how the functioning of a single economic agent (say, a household) may differ from the functioning of the economy as a whole. In the former the spending gets restricted by the individual income of a household. It can never happen that a single worker decides to spend more and this leads to an equivalent rise in her income. We shall spend more time on how higher aggregate spending leads to change in aggregate income in a later chapter. 16 The above mentioned sketchy illustration of an economy is admittedly a i simplified one. Such a story which describes the functioning of an imaginary o economy is called a macroeconomic model. It is clear that a model does o not describe an actual economy in detail. For example, our model assumes o that households do not save, there is no government, no trade with other a M countries. However models do not want to capture an economy in its every r minute detail – their purpose is to highlight some essential features of the c functioning of an economic system. But one has to be cautious not to simplify d the matters in such a way that misrepresents the essential nature of the t economy. The subject of economics is full of models, many of which will be I presented in this book. One task of an economist is to figure out which model is applicable to which real life situation. If we change our simple model described above and introduce savings, will it change the principal conclusion that the aggregate estimate of the income of the economy will remain the same whether we decide to calculate it at A, B or C? It turns out that this conclusion does not change in a fundamental way. No matter how complicated an economic system may be, the annual production of goods and services estimated through each of the three methods is the same. We have seen that the aggregate value of goods and services produced in an economy can be calculated by three methods. We now discuss the detailed steps of these calculations. Reprint 2026-27