Societies in Western civilisation enforce their rules through formal institutions such as secularism (SES), whereas in less developed civilisations often rely on informal institutions such as religion (RES). The present paper attempts to explain the determinants of societies’ choice between...

Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...

Did individual British officers determine the institutional development of former colonies? The article presents a new research program into institutional reform and economic development based on a newly established dataset of over 14,000 biographical entries of senior colonial officers in 54...

The main aim of this study is to explain how institutional change, based on processes of democratization, governs the origin and diffusion of technological innovation across economies. This study suggests that institutional change, based on a progressive democratization of countries, is a...

From the standpoint of policies, the different branches of economics may be aggregated into two categories: dirigiste and laissez fairist. Dirigiste theories in economics have been based primarily on the complexity of commodities: this allows commodities to be ranked according to the...

This paper presents an integrated overview of the literature linking institutions, financial development and economic growth. From the large body of research on institutional development, the paper first selects those contributions that make it possible to study the role of institutional...

This paper seeks to quantify the impact of transaction costs on cross-country economic growth. Our evidence from a cross-country panel data regression analysis reveals a persistent and robust negative effect of increasing transaction costs on the path of economic growth. The growth-enhancing...

The expansion of markets "globalization" was reversed during early 20th century and unfettered markets gave in to the welfare state and central planning. But the markets have been striking back since the early 1980s. Governments are withdrawn from economic activities, and many structural market...

The current WTO jurisdiction on linkages of trade and environment is not free of contradictions and has provided for heated debate due to some inconsistencies in past WTO rulings. The article argues that the WTO jurisdiction is not only unclear but also lacks economic reasoning. It aims to...

Stability is destabilizing. These three words concisely capture the insight that underlies Hyman Minsky's analysis of the economy's transformation over the entire postwar period. The basic thesis is that the dynamic forces of a capitalist economy are explosive and must be contained by...