Interrelationship Between Culture and Economy: From the Perspective of Hinduism

While culture may be a fundamental determinant of economic activity, it acts through proximate factors like the accumulation of capital, the adoption of technology, or labour market participation decisions. The decisions regarding saving, technology adoption and labour market participation are similar in that they involve some sort of constrained optimisation problem. Many Western scholars such as Max Weber, Albert Schweitzer and K. William Kapp have criticised Indian religions (comprising of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism) as too much otherworldly that their philosophy amounted to world negation and life denial. This book aims to contradict this misconception. and the theme which the authors shall be addressing is whether the Indian spiritual tradition essentially dealing with transcendence reality addresses the issue of economic progress which deals with temporal dimension of worldly life. The work also throws light on the historical aspects of economic development in India and also strives to understand two-way interrelationship between Economic System and Religion.