Last but not least, let me suggest you check the book below! There is even a chapter entitled “Buddhist Economics”, from which I quote:
(…)
While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is
mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is ‘The Middle Way’ and
therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth
that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not
the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The
keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence.
From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life
is the utter rationality of its pattern - amazingly small means leading to
extraordinarily satisfactory results.
For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used
to measuring the ‘standard of living’ by the amount of annual
consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is
‘better off’ than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would
consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is
merely a means to human well-being the aim should be to obtain the
maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if the
purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an
attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the
smallest possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual destruction of
cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible
input of toil. The less toil there is, the more time and
strength is left for artistic creativity. It would be highly uneconomic, for
instance, to go in for complicated tailoring, like the modern west, when a
much more beautiful effect can be achieved by the skilful draping of
uncut material. It would be the height of folly to make material so that it
should wear out quickly and the height of barbarity to make anything
ugly, shabby or mean. What has just been said about clothing applies
equally to all other human requirements. The ownership and the
consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is
the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum
means.
Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the
sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of
production - land, labour, and capital - as the means, The former, in
short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of
consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the
optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort
needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern
of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to
sustain a drive for maximum consumption. 'We need not be surprised,
therefore, that the pressure and strain of living is very much less in say,
Burma than it is in the United States in spite of the fact that the amount
of labour- saving machinery used in the former country is only a minute
fraction of the amount used in the latter.
Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal
pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction
by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live
without great pressure and strain and to fulfil the primary injunction of
Buddhist teaching: ‘Cease to do evil; try to do good.’ As physical
resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means
of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s
throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people
who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get
involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on
world-wide systems of trade.
From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from
local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life,
while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to
produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic
and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale. Just as the
modern
economist would admit that a high rate of consumption of transport
services between a man’s home and his place of work signifies a
misfortune and not a high standard of life, so the Buddhist economist
would hold that to satisfy human wants from faraway sources rather
than from sources nearby signifies failure rather than success. The
former tends to take statistics showing an increase in the number of
ton/miles per head of the population carried by a country’s transport
system as proof of economic progress, while to the latter - the Buddhist
economist - the same statistics would indicate a highly undesirable
deterioration in the pattern of consumption.
(…)
