Culture and Economy: Scientific Approaches to Interrelation

The article attempts to summarize the approaches to study the interrelation between culture and economy. On the one hand, it is about the cultural impact on the economy as a life-support system, i.e. about the role of cultural factors in economic development and ensuring sustainable economic growth. On the other hand, the article pays attention to the cultural factor in the context of economic science and its reflection in certain areas of economic thought (institutional economics, behavioural economics, development economics, etc.): (1) culture as an explanation of residual phenomena; (2) culture as a restriction of economic behaviour; (3) culture as a preference of economic agents. Finally, it also deals with the cultural economics as an independent branch of economic science, which studies the economic problems of culture that is responsible for the cultural engagement of the wider population and the improvement of the cultural component of human potential in general. The article justifies the necessity of incorporating of cultural factor into modern economic research as culture not only influences economic behaviour and choice of economic entities, but also determines the quality of institutes, thus forming the vectors of modern social system development.