Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Author: Douglass C. North, Randall Calvert, Thrainn Eggertsson
List Price: $16.00
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ISBN: 0521397340
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (26 October, 1990)
Sales Rank: 5,650
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Most comprehensive book ever
Douglass North is an amazing writer. If you are purchasing this book, you probably already know what this book is about and its impact. This book, I would argue is largely responsible for his receiving the Nobel Prize in 1993.His new-institutionalist view links together history, economics, political science, sociology, and every other social science. This book truly inspired me to specialize in institutional economics. Every social issue can be approached from the institutional perspective, namely that institutions determine actions and the market determines institutions. Though my professors are all old institutionalists, they agree this is the best book by far on the subject and most research papers in the subject thus reference this book.
For more information on New Institutional Social Science, visit the website at http://cniss.wustl.edu/people.html
Rating: 5 out of 5
Important for all social scientists and interesting for all
As a Japanese, I am interested in how North?fs concept ?ginstitutions?h are useful for explaining the gap in performance of the US and Japanese economy during the 1990s. What kinds of policy prescriptions can the Japanese government derive from North?fs argument on institutions?
Institutions are the constraints or mechanisms (such as rules on property rights) to reduce uncertainties inherent in human interaction and thus to reduce transaction costs. As a extreme case, you will find it difficult to make a long-term economic transaction or commitment in Baghdad just after Iraq?fs defeat in the war with the US, since there are no institutions in that particular moment.
Broadly, this concept is related to the argument by Christopher Freeman at SPRU on ?gnational system of innovation,?h especially on norms and rules on intellectual rights, and generation and transfer of technological knowledge enabled by those norms and rules. I think the US system is superior on that.
My point is that this already classic book would be valuable for thinking on those topical issues.
Rating: 5 out of 5
OBVIOUS IN RETROSPECT, WHICH MAKES IT EVEN MORE OUTSTANDING
In this book, North outlines the precise features of the neo institutional economics school, which includes Coase, Williamson, Olson, Fogel, among others. This book is mainly about the theory itself and its origins and features, not about applications in particular, though the author does address that issue at the end of the book in the section about eocnomic performance. I believe this book is great reading for the literate economist. It is difficult to follow for the non-economist, which I believe North focuses on in his other book, "Structure and Change in Economic History". That work is earlier and I believe not as complete, but it is much more readable. Either way, North's work is among the most important advances in economics in the 20th century (for which he got the Nobel Prize), so knowledge of it should benefit one and all.
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