Accounting and the Absence of a Business Economics Tradition in the United Kingdom 1

To many accounting scholars, the existence and importance of a link between accounting and economics is almost self-evident. As Hopwood (1992: 128) has put it:

The idea of a relationship between accounting, as a form of economic calculation, and economics, a form of abstract knowledge about the nature of the economic, is now a longstanding and increasingly accepted one. Conceptions of the economic nature of such accounting categories as cost and income pervade accounting treatises and even policy-orientated discussions of the craft. Economic ideas of their essential nature are used to provide a basis for gauging the adequacy of accounting calculations and to suggest possibilities for their transformation and presumed improvement. Economics, so used, is seen as a means for helping accounting to become what it should be, but what currently it is not.