Many see the concept of opportunity cost as one of the very few profound “eternal truths of economics,” which is a result of the universal nature of scarcity as the central economic problem.
Opportunity cost is a term used in economics, to mean the cost of something in terms of an opportunity forgone (and the benefits that could be received from that opportunity), or the most valuable forgone alternative.For example, if a city authority decides to build a hospital on a vacant land that it owns, the opportunity cost is some other thing that might have been done with the land and construction funds instead. In building the hospital, the city has foregone the opportunity to build a training center on that land, or a parking lot, or the ability to sell the land to reduce the city’s debt, and so on. Opportunity cost need not be assessed in monetary terms, but rather, is assessed in terms of anything that is of value to the person or persons doing the assessment. The consideration of opportunity costs is one of the key differences between the concepts of economic cost and accounting cost.

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