A palace economy is a system of economic organisation in which wealth flows out from a central source (the 'palace'), eventually reaching the common people, who have no other source of income. The division of labour in such an economy leads to a leisured elite, a class of bureaucrats, and an class of subsistence farmers. This system can be seen as a combination of a command economy and a subsistence economy.
Centrally-planned economies, such as the economy of the former Soviet Union, are alternately called command economies, because what will be produced and in what quantities is "commanded" by the government; businesses themselves are not free to make their own production decisions.
Pre-modern economies (those existing before the industrial revolution) are more difficult to analyze by today's standards, but a number of them, particularly those of hydraulic empires, may be seen as having been centrally planned as well.
There is a Trotskyist theory of the permanent arms economy, put forward by Michael Kidron, which leads on from the contention that war and accompanying industrialisation is a continuing feature of capitalist states and that central planning and other features of the war economy are ever present.
A gift economy is an economic system in which the prevalent mode of exchange is for goods and services to be given without explicit agreement upon a quid pro quo, or the concept of "a favor for a favor" in the Latin language.
A gift economy is sometimes referred to as a "sharing economy," although many economists reserve the term "sharing" for the use of a single resource by more than one consumer, such as a commons, a public library, or a shared car.
But the gift economy can also take hideous turns, as when a gift is given mainly to create an obligation, a matter often treated in myths of the hazards of accepting a gift in hell or from the fairies.
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