COMMERCE

1.1 Introduction: What Commerce Is

Did you buy a newsplper day? If so, did you stop to think how it reached you? Like so many of the things we use, the newspaper is taken for granted. We read it and cast it aside, perhaps within an hour, with scarcely a thought for the complex network of industry and enterprise needed to bring it to us punctually and regularly. Hundreds of people working in different occupations combine, often unknowingly, in producing a newspaper. For this reason, the producti of a newspaper is a good illustration of the complexities of commerce.

      The first requirement for producing a newspaper is the paper. A modern paper mill converts wood chips into huge rolls of newsprint, using elaborate machinery and employing a large number of workers undertaking different specialized jobs. Next, this paper must be delivered to the site where the newspaper is produced, which may be hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away. Several distinct commercial functions are  already involved: ransport must be arranged to deliver the paper; it must be insured while in transit: financial transactions take place (the newsprint manufacturer may have to deliver the goods before he is paid or the purchaser may have to pay in advance), and the banks may be called upon to make loans; advertising and marketing facilities will probably be used; and the newsprint will certainly have been held in a warehouse pending its dispatch for use.

    Meanwhile, other workers produce the other physical componen of a newspaper - the ink and the presses, for example. This means more commercial activity, like financing the purchase of machinery which may cost hundreds of thousands of naira.

    Quite apart from these physical componen commerce is concerned with the way the news itself is gathered. A single edition of a newspaper includes contributions from journalists all over the world, so that means ofcommunication are obviously vital: without these communication facilities, largely provided by the Post Office, news might be weeks or even months out of date before being published. More contributions arrive from photographers, tisers and many other sources. When ll these individual contributions have been received, teams of editors and sub-cditors have to prepare copy to be set while designers plan the layout of the paper. Then the printers and their staffsome highly skilled, others less so-g to work. When the papers roll off the presses they have to be packed before they can be delivered by road, rail and air to local centres. There wholesalers, retailers and streets corner newsvendors provide the final links in the chain.

    Before this stage is reached the skills of advertising agencies and of radio and television broadcasting may have been used to attract our attention to the forthcoming edition. And by the time we come to read it, production of tomorrow's edition will be well under way.

       The whole process of the production of goods, from the extraction of raw materials from the earth to the sale of the finished product to the consumer, constitutes the broad study of economics. Commerce is concerned with one section of this study: it is the system by which raw materials are distributed to industry, and the finished products to consumers. We must look briefly at the economic system as a whole, in order to see  exactly where commerce fits into the economic picture.

1.2 The Economic System: Types of Production

Every day, millions of people all over the world go to work. Why do they do so? and what is their object? The obvious answer is that they want to earn an income, but this is not an end in itself. They need the income to buy goods and services of all kinds, and this is their real reason for working. The combined efforts of these millions of workers convert raw materials into forms that can be useful and valuable to the whole population, and thus help to produce the goods and services which are needed by the community in general. As a rule production consists of three main stages (Fig. 1

(a) Primary Production

This is the first stage of production and includes workers employed in mining, quarrying, forestry and farming. All these are referred to as extractive industries. The output of such workers, especially those in mines and quarries, is likely to be in the wrong place or the wrong condition to meet the needs of the

final consumer, however. (There are a few exceptions, of course, such as the