Economic aspects of sacral heritage

The main purpose of the study was the perception of monuments of religious art by a social unit from the perspective of behavioral economics and behavioral fi-nance. The specific purpose is to find an answer to the following question: Would a social unit be willing to pay a tax for the protection of monuments of religious art, and if “yes” then how much? The study was prepared on the basis of a review of the source literature and the results of the authors’ own empirical research. This study applied a secondary literature analysis, a qualitative method (a document analysis approach and an observation), and quantitative methods (surveys). A Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA test and a Pearson’s chi-square test were used. A church is a structure that is the most commonly associated with a monument of religious art, the surveyed persons rated the highest the development of tourism by locating monuments of religious art in a given town, whereas the benefits of a social unit were rated the lowest. Economics and finance are seen here as areas influenced by the fact that a monument of religious art is part of a given locality – the development of religious tourism generates higher revenues for local government budgets and allows the development of cities or regions. At the same time, these material ben-efits apply to the macro level, whereas on the micro level (a unit, a person) there are spiritual and emotional benefits instead of material ones. Only 5% of the sur-veyed persons are willing to pay a tax for the preservation of monuments