Reaganomics

A school of thought within the economics profession emphasizing that the main source of a country's economic growth is constant improvement in the efficiency with which resources are allocated for production. While the policy recommendations of the rival Keynesian school tend to focus almost entirely on what government can do to stimulate or restrain aggregate demand in the short-run so as to even out the business cycle, supply-side policy analysts focus on barriers to higher productivity -- identifying ways in which the government can promote faster economic growth over the long haul by removing impediments to the supply of, and efficient use of, the factors of production.

Supply-side economics became particularly well-known to the general public during the 1980s because of its advocacy by one influential faction of economic policy-makers in the Reagan administration, leading to the use of the term "Reaganomics" to denote many of the ideas of the supply-siders. Supply-siders played a much smaller role in economic policy-making under the Bush administration, as the focus of attention shifted toward controlling the size of the budget deficit and away from the earlier "Reaganomics" preoccupation with accelerating the country's rate of economic growth.