Circular Flow of Income in a simple Economy.

Point A show aggregate value of goods and services using :

Income method

The correct answer is option (2) : Income method

In a simplified economy, there is only one way in which the households may dispose off their earnings – by spending their entire income on the goods and services produced by the domestic firms. The other channels of disposing their income are closed: we have assumed that the households do not save, they do not pay taxes to the government – since there is no government, and neither do they buy imported goods since there is no external trade in this simple economy. In other words, factors of production use their remunerations to buy the goods and services which they assisted in producing. The aggregate consumption by the households of the economy is equal to the aggregate expenditure on goods and services produced by the firms in the economy. The entire income of the economy, therefore, comes back to the producers in the form of sales revenue. There is no leakage from the system – there is no difference between the amount that the firms had distributed in the form of factor payments (which is the sum total of remunerations earned by the four factors of production) and the aggregate consumption expenditure that they receive as sales revenue. In the next period the firms will once again produce goods and services and pay remunerations to the factors of production. These remunerations will once again be used to buy the goods and services. Hence year after year we can imagine the aggregate income of the economy going through the two sectors, firms and households, in a circular way.

Since the same amount of money, representing the aggregate value of goods and services, is moving in a circular way, if we want to estimate the aggregate value of goods and services produced during a year we can measure the annual value of the flows at any of the dotted lines indicated in the diagram. We can measure the uppermost flow at point A by measuring the aggregate value of spending that the firms receive for the final goods and services which they produce. This method will be called the expenditure method. If we measure the flow at B by measuring the aggregate value of final goods and services produced by all the firms, it will be called product method. At C (corresponding to Point A in the question), measuring the sum total of all factor payments will be called income method.