Chang (2011) raises doubts about the effects of institutions on economic development and questions the positive effects of entirely free markets based on secure private property rights. We respond by stressing that institutions structure the incentives underlying individual action, secure...

A review essay on Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, xx+503.

The paper aims to investigate the main characteristics of institutions, as well as some of their more conspicuous peculiarities, as, for instance, their resistance to change, chiefly when compared to the capacity and speed of transformation of what is called the other social factors (or...

This paper intends to make a reflection and analysis of the impact of theoretical and methodological frameworks of reference on different neo-institutional approaches in social policy. The paper questions the functionality and continuity of the institutions that are responsible for the functions...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the contribution of trade liberalisation to differences in the level of prosperity across nations. We compare this with the relative contribution of institutional capacity to prosperity, as well as the role of human capital accumulation in that...

The present study is a continuation of an earlier paper by the same author dealing with the economic debates in the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1991 (HWWA Discussion Paper 324; Europe-Asia Studies vol. 58, no. 2). After there had been a paradigm shift in Russian economics around 1990, in the...

Natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a bad reputation. Oil and diamonds, particularly, have been blamed for a number of Africa’s illnesses such as poverty, corruption, dictatorship and war. This paper outlines the different areas and transmission channels of how this so-called...

In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art in the so-called Meso-economic Analysis. The paper begins with a heuristic approach, showing the necessity of the mesoeconomic point of view as a link between the individual economic agents and the aggregate behavior. Then, we describe both the...

In the main, Hayek favored rules that apply equally to all and located such rules in tradition, beyond conscious construction. This led Hayek to attack Keynes’s immoralism, i.e. the position that one should be free to choose how to lead one’s life irrespective of the informal institutions in...

This paper evaluates Schumpeter's grand vision as reflected in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and elaborates it in conjunction with the so-called "globalization" trends characteristic of the wake of the twenty-first century. In addition to the evolutionary nature of his methodology,...