Institutional economics has long shown that entrepreneurship plays a critical role in the pursuit of economic development and wellbeing. At the same time, entrepreneurship is complex and evolving. The path between entrepreneurship and wellbeing is not clear-cut, and not all types of...

Original institutional economics (OIE) has three significant, but apparently contradictory, definitions of institution(s) stemming from Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, and J. Fagg Foster. In this first installment of a two-part paper I address this apparent contradiction by developing an "irenic...

Small-scale farming involves millions of households in the EU and plays an important role in the rural economy. A significant percentage of these farms produce commodities for the market. This productive dimension is often overlooked, however, as is the technical support needed by these farms....

This feminist socio-ecological heuristic studies agrobiodiversity management, conservation and utilisation by men and women. Four approaches are characterised for an analysis of institutions, local knowledge, household economics and commodity chains. They are in turn linked to unveil their...

During the last 50 years, at least four interdisciplinary developments have occurred at the boundaries of political science and economics that have affected the central questions that both political scientists and economists ask, the empirical evidence amassed as a new foundation for...

We demonstrate that stakeholder-oriented multi-criteria analysis (MCA) can adequately address a variety of sustainable development dilemmas in decision-making, especially when applied to complex project evaluations involving multiple objectives and multiple stakeholder groups. Such evaluations...

This paper explores the implications of the recent revival of Hegel studies for the philosophy of economics. We argue that Hegel’s theory of Objective Spirit anticipates many elements of modern approaches in cognitive sciences and of the philosophy of mind, which adopt an externalist...

The global financial crisis of 2008 surprised most people, especially economists. Indeed, the financial crisis had a more devastating effect than simply creating the most significant global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s: It rocked the epicentre of the economics...

This paper uses the structure of institutional economics to provide an explanation of the recent U.S. financial crisis. Institutional theory suggests that a county’s political, legal, social, and cultural institutions determine and characterize its economy. An institutional perspective of...

The outbreak of the financial and economic crisis in 2007–2008 put an end to the previous consensus on monetary policy. The effects of monetary policy on redistribution have come to the foreground; the modelling and transparency of central bank decisions now require the development of an...