Specialisation

Another term for the division of labour, and a key insight of Adam Smith, who used the example of a pin factory. By breaking up a production process into a series of tasks, workers could learn to do the tasks quickly and efficiently. Productivity would be far higher than if each worker attempted to handle the entire production process on their own. At the level of the whole economy, specialisation is the means of exploiting comparative advantage and hence the gains from free trade.