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Economics is a science concerned with how people use available resources to satisfy their wants through the process of production and exchange.

Adam Smith was the founding father of modern economics as an academic discipline. He was born in 1723. For most of his life he was a professor of philosophy in Glasgow, Scotland. His first and only economic book, The Wealth of Nations, was not published until 1776, when he was 53.

Smith tried to explain why some nations become wealthier than others. He believed that a free market would maximize the welfare of population. For his opinion the role of government in the economy should be minimal, because the government restraints on competition did more harm then good. He thought that competitive business the best way to increase the wealth of nation and only market intervention should be to prevent monopoly and to promote competition.

Adam Smith argued that technical progress, division of labour and free trade between nations were central to economic growth. If a country wished to improve its standard of living it had to export more than it imported.