In this essay I intend to assess the road we have travelled in the ten years since the first conference on Institutional Economics with the objectives of suggesting where we should go from here. The suggestions will be personal reflecting both my special interests as an economic historian and my...

An economic definition of transaction costs are the costs of measuring what is being exchanged and enforcing agreements. In the larger context of societal evolution they are all the costs involved in human interaction over time. It is this larger context that I wish to explore in this essay. The...

I take my text from Max Hartwell: "...but no historian has detailed the steps by which for example, the market economy was achieved in terms of government action or changing law; no historian has linked mercantilist with laissez-faire law to trace the chronology of legal and economic change. In...

A central thesis of this chapter is that economic growth and the development of freedom are complementary processes of societal development. Economic growth provides the resources (and leisure) to support more complex societies; and it is unlikely to persist in the long run without the...

My assignment for this conference is to explore the relevance of "institutional competition" as a deliberate strategy in improving the competitiveness of economies. The historical record gives us a very mixed response with respect to the success of economies in deliberately altering the...

The argument of this essay is that the immense productivity increases resulting from technological developments of the past century and a half could only be realized by fundamental changes in the institutional and organizational structure--a supply side argument; and that the consequent tensions...

The rational choice framework assumes that individuals know what is in their self interest and make choices accordingly. However, sometimes, especially in situations of uncertainty rather than risk, people act in part upon the basis of myths, dogmas, ideologies and "half-baked" theories. We...

In this essay I intend to briefly summarize the essential characteristics of the new institutional economics, to describe how it differs from neo- classical theory, and then to apply its analytical framework (as I see it) to problems of development.

A theory of institutional change is essential for further progress in the social sciences in general and economics in particular. Essential because neo-classical theory (and other theories in the social scientist's toolbag) at present cannot satisfactorily account for the very diverse...

Improving our undertanding of the nature of economic change entails that we draw on the only laboratory that we have--the past. But "understanding" the past entails imposing order on the myriad facts that have survived to explain what has happened--that is theory. To begin we need to assess what...