Income is the consumption and savings opportunity gained by an entity within a specified timeframe, that is generally expressed in monetary terms. However, for households and individuals, "income is the sum of all the wages, salaries, profits, interests payments, rents and other forms of earnings received... in a given period of time."
For firms, income generally refers to "net-profit"—what remains of revenue total after expenses have been subtracted. In the field of public economics, the term may refer to the accumulation of both monetary and non-monetary consumption ability, with the former (monetary) being used as a proxy for total income.
Read more about Income: Increase in Income, Economic Definitions, Income Inequality, Income in Philosophy and Ethics, Accountancy
Famous quotes containing the word income:
“Work though we must, our jobs do not automatically determine our priorities concerning our marriages, our children, our social life, or even our health. It’s still life, constrained as it may be by limited disposable income or leisure time, and we’re still responsible for making it something we enjoy or endure.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The bread-winner must toil as in the fruitless effort of a troubled dream while the expenditure of an uneducated wife discounts the income in the lack of understanding to discern the broad possibilities of an intelligent economy.”
—Anna Eugenia Morgan (1845–1909)
“We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;—and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)