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Proceeding from the insight that markets and rational economic action perform best if embedded in culturally and politically generated opportunities and constraints, Streeck offers a rationale for positive political intervention in post-socialist capitalist market economies.
Institutions and Economic Performance explores the question of why income per capita varies so greatly across countries. Even taking into account disparities in resources, including physical and human capital, large economic discrepancies remain across countries. Why are some societies but not others able to encourage investments in places, people, and productivity? The answer, the book argues, lies to a large extent in institutional differences across societies. Such institutions are wide-ranging and include formal constitutional arrangements, the role of economic and political elites, informal institutions that promote investment and knowledge transfer, and others. Two core themes run through the contributors’ essays. First, what constraints do institutions place on the power of the executive to prevent it from extorting the investments and effort of other people and institutions? Second, when are productive institutions self-enforcing? Institutions and Economic Performance is unique in its melding of economics, political science, history, and sociology to address its central question.
An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.
Jan Pronk The role of institutions in economic development has been debated at length. It is a major chapter in the history of economic thought. It was also a key - sue in comparisons of the effectiveness of Eastern and Western economic systems. Understanding the variety of social and cultural institutions has - ways been crucial in analysing development processes in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Less attention has been given to institutions in studies of the economic performance of Western countries. This may be because economic policies in the West were mostly oriented to the short and medium terms rather than to the long-term perspective. In the short run ins- tutions are given, in the long run they lend themselves for change. From the outset, economic institutions (e.g. markets, enterprises) and their underlying values (e.g. efficiency, economicfreedom) received much - tention. Similar attention was given to political institutions (the state, government, the law) and values (democracy, accountability, human rights). Thought also turned to social institutions (entrepreneurship, the middle class, the family household, land-tenure systems) and social values (tradition, gender and age relations, justice). Studies soon followed of cultural insti- tions (religion, ethnicity) and values (material consumerism or the bond between man and nature). Without the insight gained by studying insti- tions, economics would have become a dull discipline.
This volume explores the foundations of trust, and whether social and political trust have common roots. Contributions by noted scholars examine how we measure trust, the cultural and social psychological roots of trust, the foundations of political trust, and how trust concerns the law, the economy, elections, international relations, corruption, and cooperation, among myriad societal factors. The rich assortment of essays on these themes addresses questions such as: How does national identity shape trust, and how does trust form in developing countries and in new democracies? Are minority groups less trusting than the dominant group in a society? Do immigrants adapt to the trust levels of their host countries? Does group interaction build trust? Does the welfare state promote trust and, in turn, does trust lead to greater well-being and to better health outcomes? The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust considers these and other questions of critical importance for current scholarly investigations of trust.
In order for economic specialization to develop, it is important that well-defined property rights are established and that suspicion and fear of fraud do not pervade transactions. Such conditions cannot be created ex abrubto, but must somehow evolve. What needs to develop is not only suitable practices and rules themselves, but also the public agencies and moral environment without which generalized trust is difficult to establish. The cultural endowment of societies as they have developed over their particular histories is bound to play a major role in this regard, and the matter of cultual endowment is one of the central themes of this book. On the other hand, division of labour does not only require well-enforced property rights and trust in economic dealings. It is also critically conditioned by the thickness of economic space, itself dependent on population density. This provides the second major theme of the volume: market development, including the development of private property rights is not possible, or will remain very incomplete, if populations are thinly spread over large areas of land. The book makes special reference to sub-Saharan Africa.
"The essential role institutions play in understanding economic development has long been recognised and has been closely studied across the social sciences but some of the most high profile work has been done by economists many of whom are included in this collection covering a wide range of topics including the relationship between institutions and growth, educational systems, the role of the media and the intersection between traditional systems of patronage and political institutions. Each chapter covers the frontier research in its area and points to new areas of research and is the product of extensive workshopping and editing. The editors have also written an excellent introduction which brings together the key themes of the handbook. The list of contributors is stellar (Steven Durlauf, Throsten Beck, Bob Allen,and includes a diverse mix of Western and non Western, male and female scholars)"
Why do some cities grow economically while others decline? Why do some show sustained economic performance while others cycle up and down? In Keys to the City, Michael Storper, one of the world's leading economic geographers, looks at why we should consider economic development issues within a regional context--at the level of the city-region--and why city economies develop unequally. Storper identifies four contexts that shape urban economic development: economic, institutional, innovational and interactional, and political. The book explores how these contexts operate and how they interact, leading to developmental success in some regions and failure in others. Demonstrating that the global economy is increasingly driven by its major cities, the keys to the city are the keys to global development. In his conclusion, Storper specifies eight rules of economic development targeted at policymakers. Keys to the City explains why economists, sociologists, and political scientists should take geography seriously.
The essays in this volume employ the insights and techniques of political science, economics and history to provide a fresh answer to this question.