Archive for March, 2012

The Cambridge IGCSE Economics syllabus requires students to describe (and therefore understand) the following as part of section 4.4 The private firm as producer and employer:

the type of business organisation in the public and private sectors: sole proprietors,
partnerships, private companies, public companies, multi-nationals, co-operatives, public corporations;

To start us thinking about some of these, we can refer to these youtube videos which essentially cover the same information.

1) Main Types of Business (by Yerlanstudent):

2) Sole Proprietorship (by humberjeff)

Notice that these videos are US based. Corporations are limited companies (but not all limited companies are corporations). We need to be able to distinguish between private and public limited companies.

The following websites are useful resources for understanding the differences between the different types of business organisation further:

1) Tutor2U: gcse economics – firms – types of business ownership

2) biz/ed: public liability (but also a comparison of business types) [more complex notes]

3) thetimes100: Types of businesses [note that the tables in boxes have overlap between the columns so need a bit of concentration]

Additional revision pages:

1) Excellent summary powerpoint hosted at tutor2u (you don’t need to know franchises on this syllabus)

2) Business Structure on GCSE Bitesize (primarily for Business Studies)