BIOECONOMICS AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE

The aim of this paper is to identify and elucidate the bioeconomics, which traces the links among biology and economy, as a relatively new field of economics and political economy. To make a clear distinction between bioeconomics and bioeconomy, the paper presents a set of definitions of both categories and explains the reasoning behind them. This research is of theoretical nature and is based on extensive review of the scientific literature dealing with the relationship of biology with social sciences, including theories of leading contributors to economic thought. Such phenomena as evolution, cooperation, competition over scarce resources, selection, work division, signalling, territorialism and migration are the common to the economy of nature and the human economy. The study finds out that the conceptual and methodological trade between economic discourse and biological discourse goes back, at least, to the 18th century but many parallels between economic and social behaviour of humans and biology were observed and studied much earlier. Contemporary bioeconomists argue that economics and biology can mutually enrich each other, emphasize on what biology can be taught from economics and how economics can accommodate insights from biology.