Answer: Scarcity always exists because human wants for goods and services exceed the quantity of goods and services that can be produced from all available resources. This is an economic concept rooted in one of the most basic facts of life: we live in a world of limited resources that requires choices about how they are allocated¹. In that sense, every product down to a pack of gum or a book of matches is scarce, since someone expended resources that could have been deployed elsewhere to produce it¹. Even abundant common resources long consumed at zero apparent cost often prove neither free nor limitless eventually. Therefore, scarcity is a fundamental concept in economics that conveys the opportunity cost of allocating limited resources.