More General Uses
Stocks and flows also have natural meanings in many contexts outside of business and its related fields. Thus stocks and flows are the basic building blocks of system dynamics models. Jay Forrester originally referred to them as "levels" (for stocks) and "rates" (for flows).
A stock (or "level variable") in this broader sense is some entity that is accumulated over time by inflows and/or depleted by outflows. Stocks can only be changed via flows. Mathematically a stock can be seen as an accumulation or integration of flows over time - with outflows subtracting from the stock. Stocks typically have a certain value at each moment of time - e.g. the number of population at a certain moment.
A flow (or "rate") changes a stock over time. Usually we can clearly distinguish inflows (adding to the stock) and outflows (subtracting from the stock). Flows typically are measured over a certain interval of time - e.g., the number of births over a day or month.
Read more about this topic: Stock And Flow
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