To avoid famine and economic dislocation, countries use different kinds of policies to provide incentives or disincentives for the production of different crops. Subsidies are used to encourage agricultural production. They come in many forms, but collectively they give producers the ability to sell products at prices that are lower than would otherwise be possible. Almost every developed country has found itself subsidizing agricultural producers. The exceptions ― New Zealand, Australia, and to some extent Canada ― represent special cases since they do not have large rural populations and their natural advantages in certain crops permit them to produce at lower costs than most other countries. Subsidies ensure agricultural surpluses under most conditions, and they allow producers in a country that subsidizes agriculture to reap benefits as producers in non-subsidizing countries are forced out of business.

Houses in Britain are too expensive in relation to income for households to buy a house for ready money at the beginning of their housing career or accumulate the purchase money from prior savings. Most householders must therefore either hire a house, or buy one with borrowed money. Housing must therefore be financed, and the finance has to be for a long term. For buyers using borrowed funds, long-term loans are necessary to ensure that the principal repayments can be spread out thinly enough to be covered by annual income. The investor in rental properties often finds that the yearly rent only covers a small portion of the debt used to purchase the property.

The customary starting point for economic theory, the basic model to which other situations and policy options are compared, is a system of perfectly competitive markets. This imagined economy is populated exclusively by small producers and individual consumers, all possessed of very broad information and very narrow motives and desires. In such an economy, under long lists of traditional but unrealistic assumptions, economists have proved that there is always an "equilibrium" ― that is, a set of prices at which supply equals demand for every commodity. The invisible hand of market competition, in Adam Smith's famous metaphor, ensures that every resource is used wherever it will produce the greatest value for consumers. Any deviation from the free-market outcome will make someone worse off, so there is no possible change to a market equilibrium that could win unanimous support.

Over the years, the sports sector and the media sector have developed a self-interest relationship. Both industries gain benefits from the complementary nature of their interests: while sport provides valuable content and audiences for media operators, the media is a revenue source and promotional tool for sport. The sale of exclusive live sports broadcasting rights is an important, if not the principal, source of revenue for sports organisations and clubs, whereas live sports content is decisive for media operators to create attractive programming for their audience. Wide coverage through television, for instance, can result in significant exposure for sports leagues. Such exposure can deliver private benefits to the league and the clubs in the form of increased revenue from sponsorship and attraction of new supporters. This implies that, without cameras, major sports events would have virtually no meaning at all.