What is the difference between "economic" and "economical"?
- Anybody can ask a question
- Anybody can answer
- The best answers are voted up and rise to the top
Economic and economical can only be synonyms in two senses.
Otherwise, when you're talking about wealth, financial rewards, or the science of economics, it's always economic. If you mean the sense of thrifty or frugal you would use economical.
Economic is normally used to describe things of or having to do with economics or the economy.
Economical is more in regards to thriftiness.
However, in more than one source I saw them as definitions of each other.
Something that saves money and cuts your unnecessary expenses is economical, for example: My car is beautiful and really economical, but in the issues of business and finance we use the adjective economic,e.g, we haven't had any economic growth since last year.