Political economy

Political economy—sometimes referred to as comparative economy—is a branch of political science and economics that studies economic systems (such as markets and national economies) and how they are governed by political systems, including laws, institutions, and governments.

The discipline analyzes phenomena such as labour markets, international trade, growth, the distribution of wealth, and economic inequality, as well as the ways in which these are shaped by political institutions, legal frameworks, and public policy. Emerging in the 18th century, political economy is integral to modern economics.

In its modern form, political economy is an interdisciplinary field that integrates insights from political science and contemporary economics to study the interaction between politics and markets.

Political economy originated within 16th century western moral philosophy, with theoretical works exploring the administration of states' wealth – political referring to polity, and economy derived from Greek οἰκονομία "household management". The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats, such as François Quesnay, Richard Cantillon and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. Varied thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx saw economics and politics as inseparable.

In the late 19th century, the term economics gradually began to replace the term political economy with the rise of mathematical modeling coinciding with the publication of the influential textbook Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall in 1890. Earlier, William Stanley Jevons, a proponent of mathematical methods applied to the subject, advocated economics for brevity and with the hope of the term becoming "the recognised name of a science". Citation measurement metrics from Google Ngram Viewer indicate that use of the term economics began to overshadow political economy around roughly 1910, becoming the preferred term for the discipline by 1920. Today, the term economics usually refers to the narrow study of the economy absent other political and social considerations while the term political economy represents a distinct and competing approach.