Institutions again have become the focus of the theorizing and empirical work of economists concerned with the determinants of economic growth, and of cross country differences in income levels. One central argument of this paper is that institutions and institutional change need to be...

In this work, meant as an introduction to the contributions of the task force on Industrial Policies and Development, Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, New York, we discuss the role of institutions and policies in the process of development. We begin by arguing how misleading...

The last quarter-century has seen the rise of an almost religious belief in the efficacy of market organization of economic activity. While there are strong empirically supported reasons for a bias toward market organization, particularly considering the alternatives, there are many areas of...

We draw upon historical evidence from several countries and contemporary studies of national innovation systems to argue that indigenous systems of academic training and public research have been in the past important elements of the institutional structures supporting a country’s economic...

It is widely recognized that advances in knowhow have been the key driving force between the great improvements in human material well-being that have been achieved over the past two centuries. However, not much attention has been directed to the fact that the advances in knowhow that have been...

The term "bounded rationality" is meant to connote the reasoning capabilities of an actor who, on the one hand, has a goal to achieve and an at least partially formed theory as to how to achieve it, and on the other hand, that the theory is somewhat crude, likely will be revised in the course of...

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in how institutions affect economic performance. A review of this literature reveals that the concept of an ‘institution’ means different things to different scholars, both within economics and across the social sciences. This paper discusses...

The conventional wisdom regarding the source of progress in medical practice highlights the role of basic scientific research into the nature of disease pathologies. This perspective neglects the important role of two other sources of progress in medicine. One is the advance of technologies that...

This book is a collection of original articles that view the current state of knowledge about the convergence hypothesis.