Individuals, businesses, and countries must decide how to best use scarce resources. opportunity cost: the value of the best alternative that is when making a decision specialization: efforts on particular kind of activity ❖ allows a person, business, or country to in that activity ❖ helps a nation make the most use of its resources  produce certain goods and services using its most scarce abundant resources  sell those goods and services and others that they need  every country can specialize in some kind of and in trade ❖ based on factors such as , mineral resources, and availability of