问答题 A market is commonly thought of as a place where commodities are bought and sold. Thus fruit and vegetables are sold wholesale at Covent Garden Market and meat is sold wholesale at Smithfield Market. But there are markets for things other than commodities in the usual sense. 21 There are real estate markets, foreign exchange markets, labor markets, short-term capital markets and so on; there may be a market for anything which has a price. And there may be no particular place to which dealings are confined. 22 Buyers and sellers may be scattered over the whole world and instead of actually meeting together in a market-place they may deal with one another by telephone, telegram, cable or letter. Even if dealings are restricted to a particular place, the dealers may consist wholly or in part of agents acting on instructions from clients far away. Thus agents buy meat at Smithfield on behalf of retail butchers all over England; and brokers on the London Stock Exchange buy and sell securities on instructions from clients all over the world. 23 We must therefore define a market as an area over which buyers and sellers are in such close touch with one another either directly or through dealers, that the prices obtainable in one part of the market affect the prices paid in other parts.
24 Modern means of communication are so rapid that a buyer can discover what price a seller is ask in, g, and can accept it if he wishes, although he may be thousands of miles away. Thus the market for anything is, potentially, the whole world. But in fact things have, normally, only a local or national market.
This may be because nearly the whole demand is concentrated in one locality. These special local demands, however, are of quite minor importance. 25 The main reason why many things have not a world market is that they are costly or difficult to transport.