The economy is the process of the production, distribution, and consumption of its products, which are goods and services.

The economic process involves converting the resources that the Earth and its environments provide such as minerals, wood, water, and energy, into manufactured goods; transporting those goods from the factories where they are made to the shops where they are sold; and selling the goods to consumers.  These three stages of the economic process are called production, distribution, and consumption.

The economic process starts with collection of the resources from the natural world, and ends with the consumption of the completed goods by the consumer.

The flow of resources through the economic process looks like this:

The material of the final consumed goods originates with the resources collected from the Earth at the start of the economic process. This means that these resources underpin the entire economic process: without these resources provided by the Earth and its environments the economic process cannot happen.

This page is linked from:

economic activity 

resource use and economic activity

what the economy is

why the economy is consumption

limits to the use of resources

using resources unsustainably

the economic process

renewable resource use as principal and interest

goods and services

the resources of the Earth

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