the.com/comparative advantage

means An economic principle stating that a person, firm, or country should specialize in producing whatever they can make at the lowest opportunity cost — not necessarily what they're best at in absolute terms — because trade based on relative efficiency makes everyone better off.

from Coined and developed in early-19th-century political economy, most famously by David Ricardo in his 1817 work on trade, as a refinement of Adam Smith's earlier idea of absolute advantage. Ricardo's insight — illustrated with his classic example of England and Portugal trading cloth and wine — was that trade benefits both sides even when one country is worse at producing everything, as long as each specializes in what it sacrifices least to produce. The term itself crystallized gradually over the 19th century as economists formalized Ricardo's reasoning into the 'law of comparative advantage,' now a cornerstone of trade theory.