A business (also known as an enterprise, a company, or a firm) is an organizational entity and legal entity made up of an association of people, be they natural, legal, or a mixture of both who share a common purpose and unite in order to focus their various talents and organize their collectively available skills or resources to achieve specific declared goals and are involved in the provision of goods and services to consumers. A business can also be described as an organization that provides goods and services for human needs.
A company or association of persons can be created at law as legal person so that the company in itself can accept limited liability for civil responsibility and taxation incurred as members perform (or fail) to discharge their duty within the publicly declared “birth certificate” or published policy.
Because companies are legal persons, they also may associate and register themselves as companies – often known as a corporate group. When the company closes it may need a “death certificate” to avoid further legal obligations.
Businesses serve as conductors of economic activity, and are prevalent in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and provide goods and services allocated through a market to consumers and customers in exchange for other goods, services, money, or other forms of exchange that hold intrinsic economic value.
Businesses may also be social nonprofit enterprises or state-owned public enterprises operated by governments with specific social and economic objectives.
A business owned by multiple private individuals may form as an incorporated company or jointly organized as a partnership. Countries have different laws that may ascribe different rights to the various business entities.
The word “business” can refer to a particular organization or to an entire market sector (for example, “the finance business” is “the financial sector”) or to all economic sectors collectively (“the business sector”). Compound forms such as “agribusiness” represent subsets of the concept’s broader meaning, which encompasses all activity by suppliers of goods and services.
Typically private-sector businesses aim to maximize their profit, although in some contexts they may aim to maximize their sales revenue or their market share. Government-run businesses may aim to maximize some measure of social welfare.
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