Определить предмет экономической науки в ходе ее Formation and development failed immediately. To describe this concept in a few words is impossible. No short definition will reveal the essence of the phenomena apprehended by economics.
Subject of economic science determined by various researchersdifferently. You can specify such definitions as “activities related to exchange and monetary transactions”, “daily business life, during which livelihoods and their use are extracted”, “people's behavior in the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of material goods” and etc.
The difficulty of determining the subject of this sciencedue to the fact that economic relations are extremely complex and intertwined with each other a great number of times, each time resulting in qualitatively new types of relations. They include millions of people, enterprises, industries, goods, services and prices for them.
The subject of economic science in the understanding of Westernresearchers is reduced to the study of phenomena and the description of the facts of an economic nature: money, markets, credit relations, unemployment, inflation, demand, supply, profits, etc. In this context, the relationships between these phenomena, their mutual influence and interdependence are studied.
Currently, more and more attention is attractingthe study of universal values that arise from the process of the so-called natural self-regulation of life, the laws of interaction of people with nature and the material environment. This leads to the fact that the subject of economic science begins to be interpreted with some changes.
Since the man for his life has not yet foundsource of inexhaustible resources that can be used to ensure their own livelihoods, it is highly dependent on what nature provides. The limited nature of natural resources sets before society the task of choosing directions, as well as the ways of using those resources that it has available for a certain period. Methods for solving these problems are the subject of economic science.
Methodology of economics - this is the science of its methods.At the present stage, economics has a large set of methods used to understand economic realities. These methods have been formed since antiquity, beginning with Aristotle and Heraclitus, which laid the basis for the dialectical view of the world. This principle is still widely used by economics in its research.
In addition, she uses methods such asthe study of economic processes in the relationship of phenomena and their development, as synthesis and analysis, deduction and induction, causes and effects, the distinction between the essence and the phenomena themselves, the movement of thought from the abstract to the concrete and many others.
However, economics has andspecific research methods, which are determined by the specific goals of the objects of scientific research. The main principle of economics is the study of facts, and not given a priori dogma. For this, she uses the methods of specific study, the classification of representative and reliable facts, their synthesis and analysis, and the purification of facts from the accidental and insignificant. On the basis of this, economic laws and models are derived.
Stages of development of economic science in general, it can be reduced to four periods:
- Pre-scientific development (until the 18th century)
- The origin of economic science (1750-1870)
- Discovery and development of the main fundamental principles of economic theory (1870-1930 gg.)
- Modern theoretical research and development (after the 1930s).
The main stages of the development of economic thought- This is mercantilism, classical political economy (physiocrats, market school), Marxist political economy and the economics line (neoclassics and neo-Keynesians).
