Economics is an area of activity with the goal of creating spiritual and material wealth to satisfy the most varied needs of people.
The subject and method of economic theory consider the socio-economic relations between individuals in the process of distribution, production, exchange and consumption of products and services. First, we consider the subject of economic theory, which is the sphere of distribution and production of goods and services, subject to limited resources. To better reflect economic reality, the theory of economics includes many separate sciences: a general economic theory that studies economic civilization as a whole and private economic theories that study individual parts of the economic space, such as labor economics, statistics, management, finance theory , accounting , marketing, agricultural economics and industry. Political economy, the theory of evolutionary economics and some others claim the status of a general economic theory.
Considering the subject and method of economic theory, one cannot but say that it examines economic laws in order to increase efficiency, economic growth, full employment, economic freedom, a stable price level, economic security, fair distribution of income, and trade balance.
The main methods in the economy include: scientific abstraction, analysis and synthesis, qualitative and quantitative analysis, observation and experiment, and many others.
These are, in general terms, the subject and method of economic theory.
Now there are many different teaching and methodological aids. In textbooks on economics you can often find the title of a chapter or paragraph “The subject and method of economic theory”, and we are not without sin - we have paid tribute to tradition, although this is not entirely true. It would be more correct to write “The subject and methods of economic theory”, because there is no one, only, universal method in economics. There are many, a whole complex, and we will now consider them.
Methods are scientific techniques, ways of knowing the economy, understanding economic development. The theory of economics is based on the following methods: simple (generalization, observation, grouping, comparison) and developed: analysis and synthesis, quantitative and qualitative approaches, historical and logical, modeling, formalization and others.
The formation and development of economic theory can be considered in several stages, starting with the ancient Greek period:
1) the era of antiquity: the foundations of analysis laid down by Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon (V-IV centuries BC), studied the slave system, subsistence farming ;
2) the era of feudalism, during which the relationship between subsistence and commodity economy was studied, a high assessment was given of the role of labor, the interaction between farms;
3) the era of bourgeois political economy: mercantilists (16th - 17th centuries) paid great attention to the sphere of circulation; classical political economy (17th - 19th centuries) associated wealth with the sphere of production, first in agriculture, and then in other branches of production. The economists of this period developed a theory of value ;
4) the development of political economy of labor: in Marxism, the economic system is analyzed from the point of view of the interests of the working class. On the basis of Marxism, social democracy and Leninism appear;
5) 20th century: neoclassicists investigated pricing and equilibrium in market mechanisms; the emergence of state-monopoly capitalism, Keynesianism, liberalism.
In recent decades, it can be noted: institutionalism; post-industrial economy; theory of transition to a market economy.