Contributions to Canadian economic history: The last 30 years

The cliometric revolution that transformed economic history in the US in the 1960s was soon embraced by Canadian economic historians. Many of the important issues surrounding Canadian development remained the same: the role of resources, the place of international trade, immigration, capital accumulation and interactions with Native Americans, among others. But beginning in the 1960s, and certainly over the last 30 years, economic historians of Canada have addressed them with the tools of modern economics, both theoretical and empirical. We highlight the recent work emphasizing not just the methods but also the fundamental ways our understanding of Canadian history has been changed.     

The nexus of economic and institutional evolution

The current state of the development economics literature ascribes an indisputable central role to institutions. This paper presents a formal model of institutional evolution that is based on the dynamic interactions between formal and informal institutions and economic development; the main features of the model is consistent with the fundamental theories that shed light to institutional evolution, namely the collective action and transaction cost theories, as well as dialectics. As informal institutional quality accumulates like technological know-how, while the level of formal institutional quality is chosen by the government to maximize welfare, subject to the economic and political costs. The solution of the model yields a punctuated trajectory of formal institutional evolution. Simulations reveal that the extent of diversity in informal institutional quality across a country delays formal institutional reforms. We also observe that, both the optimal quality of formal institutions and welfare are higher the more homogeneous is the country with respect to its informal institutions or the cultural attributes.     

The institutional foundation of China's economic growth

China's economic growth is (undoubtedly, undeniably, unquestionably) regarded as a miracle due to the changes it has brought to the lives of the Chinese as well as to the global economic structure. This paper analyzes China's economic growth from the perspective of institutional reforms. The main argument is that, through the redefinition of property rights, the operation costs of China's planned economy under full public ownership have been reduced dramatically. Human resources have greatly improved in terms of productivity and creativity, thus providing China with competitive advantages in the global market.     

新制度经济学革命:路径与方向

20世纪60、70年代,新制度经济学开始在经济学领域的诸多方面实现了理论突破,许多经济学者大胆预言"新制度经济学革命"即将到来.不过随着研究的深入,人们发现新制度经济学并未真正突破新古典分析框架,只是在多个层面上对新古典经济学进行了继承和发展.文章在简要评价新古典经济学学说体系的基础上,归纳新制度经济学的三条主要革新路径,通过与主流经济学的综合比较,对新制度经济学各分支革新的路径与方向进行了评价.     

绿色经济制度体系--推进循环经济发展的制度创新

从本质上说，发展循环经济就是在生产、流通、消费、分配的每一个环节实现废弃物减量化、资源化、无害化，实际上就是废弃物资源的有效配置问题。基于此，本文以界定废弃物是资源为前提，从微观经济学角度，通过探讨废弃物资源有效配置机制，透析当今资源短缺和环境恶化的制度根源，寻求实现废弃物资源有效配置即发展循环经济的制度切入点——绿色经济制度体系，以期为循环经济的发展奠定经济学理论基础。     

An institutional approach to national development planning

The increasingly turbulent and unstable international environment requires new approaches to development planning. Current methods need to be reformulated, perhaps by employing an “institutional approach.” Three possible directions are discussed: the need to enlarge the scope of anticipatory decisions covered by the planning process; the need to reinterpret and redefine the concept of the planning horizon, transcending the limitations of the distinctions between short-, medium-, and long-term planning; and the imperative of dispersing planning capabilities throughout society.     

Explaining the economic trajectories of civilizations: The systemic approach

A civilization constitutes a durable social system of complementary traits. Some of the complementarities of any given civilization are between elements of “material” life and ones commonly treated as integral to “culture.” Identifying the mechanisms responsible for a civilization's observed trajectory involves, therefore, causal relationships that cross the often-postulated “cultural–material” divide. Complementarities make it difficult to transplant institutions across civilizations on a piecemeal basis. They imply that reforms designed to jump-start an economy will fail unless they are comprehensive. Civilizational analysis can benefit, therefore, from attention to institutional complementarities, including ones involving both cultural and material variables.     

Rational inattention and revealed preference: The data-theoretic approach to economic modeling

Beliefs have as pervasive a role as utility functions in economic models of choice, and are no more visible to the naked eye. This suggests the value of a data-theoretic approach to imperfect information along the lines of Samuelson's “revealed preference” approach to utility maximization. I introduce a recently developed approach of this nature (Caplin and Martin, 2013a, Caplin and Dean, 2013a, Caplin and Dean, 2013b). I highlight the broader potential of the data-theoretic approach to answer questions of an inter-disciplinary nature and to discipline an oncoming flood of behaviorally-relevant data.     

Why China's approach to institutional change has begun to succeed

In the constantly changing modern economic environment, a country's ability to implement institutional reforms is crucial to maintain economic growth and to promote the welfare of its citizens. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to persuade institutional stakeholders that the change is necessary, and as a result, efforts at institutional change often fail. To avoid situations in which change is sudden and disruptive, China has chosen a more cautious approach of gradual institutional change leading to smooth reform, which Deng Xiaoping referred to as “crossing the river by stepping from stone to stone” — a metaphor that translates into doing a careful experiment before broad application of an approach for which you lack prior experience. This approach allows adaptation to local conditions during subsequent broader adoption of a new approach, and can thereby decrease the risks and costs of adopting a new strategy by first testing the change and then demonstrating the potential benefits to local residents and governments. This innovative approach has been a key component of China's economic reforms since 1978, and the Chinese experience shows how adapting programs to local natural and social conditions can help to motivate change and sustain the implementation of new institutions.     

Activity choice: A new approach to economic behavior

An individual's work and consumption behavior is modeled as the outcome of an optimal choice among activities at each moment within a ‘day’. The model describes the time-shapes of his demand for goods and services, labor supply, and activities within the day and it allows the analysis of choices in which unusually complex motivations are incorporated. It is applicable to questions of job satisfaction, peak demands, shift working and capital utilization, estimation of ‘the value of time’, goal and process utilities, intrinsic and extrinsic satisfactions, ‘labor’ versus ‘labor power’, and to the issues of compulsive consumption and self-control.     

Love, war and cultures: an institutional approach to human evolution

Love, war and culture have all played an important role in the evolution of human institutions and they have been characterized by complex relationships. War can select unselfish groups ready to sacrifice themselves for the love of their communities that they recognize to be culturally different from the others. At the same time, horizontal cultural differentiation cannot be taken for granted. Culture is the outcome of long evolutionary processes. It requires some human specific characteristics, including a large brain, that are likely to have been influenced by sexual selection and by the peculiar structure of human love affairs. Thus, if war may have generated love, also the reverse may be true: by favoring the development of human culture, love may have produced the conditions for war among culturally differentiated groups. In turn, war may have co-evolved with group solidarity only under the prevailing social arrangements of hunting and gathering economies. In general, human relations have been influenced by the prevailing features of the goods (private, public and positional) that have characterized production in different stages of history. They have been embedded in institutions involving very different levels of inequality, ranging from mostly egalitarian hunting and gathering societies to typically hierarchical agrarian societies and to wealth-differentiated industrial societies. The perspectives of the present-day knowledge-intensive economy can also be seen through the same institutional approach to human evolution. The different nature of contemporary production processes involves a new set of alternative possible arrangements that have different implications for social (in)equality and different capabilities to satisfy basic human needs.     

The institutional,economic and social determinants of local government transparency

Interest in transparency is increasing worldwide. Literature on their determinants is evolving but is still in early stages. So far, it has typically focused on national governments while neglecting local governments. This paper examines the economic, social, and institutional determinants of local government transparency in Spain. We broaden the traditional fiscal focus by including corporate, social, contracting, and planning transparency indexes. Our results indicate that large municipalities and left-wing mayors report better transparency indexes; while the worst results are presented by provincial capitals, touristic cities and mayors with absolute majority. The analysis of specific transparency categories generally shows the consistent impact of these determinants.     

Kaldorian approach to Greek economic growth

In the last 30 years, Greece has experienced a rapid of economic growth which has transformed the economy and enable it to become a member of the EEC. Specifically Greece transformed itself from an agricultural economy with virtually no industrial base to an economy with a significant industrial sector and consequently a relatively high income per capita. One can explain this on the lines of a Kaldorian framework. In this paper we provide an outline of Kaldor's growth model and test its relevance to the economic experience of Greece during the 1967–1988 period. The empirical results suggest that the model can adequately explain the development in the economy to a considerable degree.     

Teaching the history of economic thought

The main purpose of this survey is to present the results of a questionnaire recently sent to historians of economic thought. This questionnaire — presented in the appendix - was devised so as to provide data on the approaches and experiences of teaching the history of economic thought in a wide range of universities throughout the world.

A summary of the most significant results is presented in section 2 of this survey. Section 1 provides a general introduction to the methodological context of the discussion of problems concerning the teaching of the discipline.     

A Pasinettian approach to international economic relations: the pure labor case

In this paper, the pure labor version of Pasinetti's model of structural change and economic dynamics is extended to consider international economic relations. The conditions for full employment, full expenditure of national income and trade balance equilibrium are established along with solutions for the systems of physical quantities and prices in an open economy. Analytical results concerning the benefits of international trade and learning are studied with formal rigor. Then static and dynamic aspects of the principle of comparative cost advantages are analyzed considering the determinants of the level of specialization and international prices.     

A Kaldorian approach to Greek economic growth: a reply

The author of the comment makes three general points in the beginning and then proceeds to state her own econometric findings. In our reply each law is taken separately. dealing first with the theoretical points and then with the empirical ones.