The only mechanism through which human labour can be converted into the economic needs of human life is the thin terrestrial biosphere. All food and the energy to harvest, process and cook it ; all materials and the energy needed to transform them into useful products come from the land and the sea of Planet Earth.
However much our modern artificial free market system may remove and insulate us from the direct deployment of land, it is nevertheless land which is - and shall forever remain - mankind's first and most vital economic resource.
Consequently, however decoupled from the land human economics may appear to become, there must always be some enterprises within the global economy which deploy land. That is why land is an essential part of the resource structure of this generic model of the business process. All other economic resources come from - or are sustained by - land. That is why land is illustrated above as the domain within which all other economic resources are contained.
The economic resources of a generic business may be conceptualised as a sequence of 'concentric' domains, each spatially contained within the one beyond it. These share a symmetry with the logical domains of the trading market. Starting with the outermost, these domains may be classified as follows.
All the economic resources available to mankind as a whole are contained within the terrestrial biosphere of Planet Earth. We, the human race, inherited it by default. It is ours for free to use and exploit as we will - for good or for evil. No landlord demands of us a rent for being here. Collectively speaking, we owe no debt or mortgage for its purchase.
Beneath the collective idyll, however, few of many they be who actually own this planet. The artificial rules, according to which the common inheritance of mankind is divided, deem that all land be shared among a favoured few; while most are - from birth to death - of land dispossessed. For all to survive, two things are therefore necessary. Those few who own land must deploy some of it at least to providing the dispossessed many with:
It may be the vast acreage of a landed estate. It may be the land occupied by a factory, workshop or office. It may be the one-day-a-week rented pitch for a stall in a street market. However much or however little, whether owned by the proprietor or not, land is thus absolutely necessary to the business process.
The term 'crops' is here used in a general sense. It refers to anything of economic value which is obtained from the land. This includes food. It includes wood both as a material and as a fuel. It includes minerals extracted or mined from beneath the surface of the land such as water, oil, coal, stone, metals. It also includes the use of land for such things as buildings and roads. In this sense, the rent levied for the lands on which rest buildings occupied by 'customers' may also be thought of as a 'crop'.
All economic operations require some form of accommodation, be it to work in or merely for storing produce. Buildings, as an economic resource of a generic business, are those owned or rented by the proprietor of the business, and used to accommodate processes, equipment and goods pertaining to the business.
These are concerned with the particular activities of the business - what it produces and how it produces it. These are, generally speaking:
The economic resources of the business are reflected in a resource database. Within this is maintained information on each resource. Each economic resource thus has a data record containing such information as the resource's:
These formal particulars can be maintained in a conventional relational database. It can prove useful also to regard each resource as a subject or issue in the sense established in the discussion on the market database. This allows information on each resource to be linked with those entities in the trading market with which it may be associated; e.g. businesses who buy or supply it, or people who in some way influence the market for it.