WEALTH. In economics wealth may mean either a stock or fund existing at a given time or a flow of valuable goods and services during a period of time. In dealing with the production, exchange, distribution and consumption of wealth, economics is concerned very largely with the origins of the community's an nual income and with the disposition which is made of it. This annual flow of income, or national dividend, may be conceived of as comprising all of the valuable commodities which pass into the hands of their final consumers during the year, together with the valuable personal services (e.g., the services of the Government; of physicians, of actors, of household servants) rendered during the year, apart from those which come to the consumer embodied, as we might say, in the products of industry and trade. Alterna tively, the community's annual flow of wealth may be identified with its annual product, which comprises the personal services directly rendered to consumers, as aforesaid, together with the re sults of all that is accomplished during the year in forwarding products towards their final form and destination, and in augment ing the community's productive equipment. The two concep tions overlap, for both include the products of work which is performed and comes to its final fruition within the year. But one conception includes, in addition, the ripened fruits of work done in the past, while the other includes fruits of present work which will reach their maturity only in future years. The money value of what we may call consumers' real income (the first of the two conceptions) will not, in general, be the same as the money value of the annual product. In a prosperous com munity, where saving is growing relatively to consumption, the money value of the annual product will be the larger of the two. It is always approximately equal to the aggregate amount of the net money incomes received during the year. It lends itself better to statistical measurement than consumers' real income does, and, it is the better index of the community's economic welfare.
Viewed as a stock or fund, wealth is an aggregate of scarce and valuable objects. Some of these valuable objects are given by nature, others are the products of man's industry and thrift, but all of them, irrespective of their origins or their cost, are valued prospectively, looking towards the future, with reference to their importance as aids to production or to their more direct beneficial uses. Wealth can be described by means of a stock-taking or inventory, but it can be summed or measured as a whole only in terms of its money value. Wealth is always something owned, whether the ownership be private or public. Its value is the sum of the values of existing property rights. Securities, such as stocks, shares and bills, are among the objects of property, but if these are to be counted as wealth, account must be taken of the circum stance that they are offset by an equal amount of "negative wealth" —the liabilities of their issuers. In arriving at the wealth of the people of a given country or region (as distinguished from the wealth within that country or region), the net balance of external assets and external liabilities must be included.
It is obvious that the degree of a country's economic well-being depends upon the character and extent of its unappropriable re sources—sunshine, rainfall, rivers, harbours—as well as upon the appropriable objects of wealth within its borders. Is not a navi gable river, therefore, as much an item in a nation's wealth as a railway or a canal? Yes, in the sense that a nation's wealth is larger because of an abundance of these natural advantages. No, if is meant that no evaluation of a nation's wealth is complete if separate account is not taken of such things. (See also Eco