Institutional Matrices Theory,or X- and Y-Theory: A Response to F. Gregory Hayden

This article draws attention to issues about the institutional matrices theory (IMT) as perceived by and raised in the article by F. Gregory Hayden. To clarify the “controversial” points, I structure my response narrative along two lines. First, I present the prehistory of IMT, or X- and Y- theory, including earlier work by scientists related to the concept of institutional matrix. I connect the development of the actual IMT with the period of “perestroika” and the associated market experiments and reforms in Russia and Eastern European countries. One could see that the effects of market reforms in Russia were different in comparison with other countries in economic transition. I show that the institutional approach was accepted as more relevant to understanding the unexpected results in Russian society. I present IMT as a development of the ideas of Karl Polanyi and Douglas North to answer the challenges of explaining the real social and economic processes in Russia, as well as its wider application to a broader range of economic and social situations in different countries. Second, I then present the main IMT theses, giving special attention to the issues as perceived and raised by Hayden. In conclusion, I suggest the possibility of a joint project that combines IMT consideration and the social fabric matrix (SFM) concept of F. Gregory Hayden.     

影响国有经济产业分布的经济因素及实证分析

影响国有经济产业分布状况的经济因素主要有两个：一是国有经济本身的性质特点与制度优势;二是社会经济各部门的产业性质和特点。本文通过分析国有经济本身的性质特点、比较优势,结合对社会经济各部门的产业性质及其对产权制度安排的要求的研究,论证了国有经济产业分布的基本模式,并通过实证分析进行了验证。     

Understanding Social Market Economy,Francesco Forte and His Interpretation

The social thought which emerges from Francesco Forte’s economic writings proves to be mainly inspired by methodological individualism, though interpreted through a peculiar “personalistic” key. We will analyze the peculiar traits of his thought and the specific contribution that Forte gave to the understanding of a specific economic theory based on the doctrine of “Ordoliberalism” or the “Freiburg School.” In our work, we will show how Forte proposes an interpretation of that doctrine, according to two of his main points of reference in economic and philosophical thought: Luigi Einaudi and Antonio Rosmini Serbati. Finally, we will present an important aspect of Forte’s work: his institutional analysis in the light of the particular civil philosophy expressed by Christian social teaching.     

Conversion of the Cuban Economy to Soviet Orthodoxy

Our hypothesis is that both the transition phases and the diversity of trajectories of post-communist countries are the result of a significant difference in actors' strategic behavior. If we apply game theory to the socioeconomic context of post-communist evolution, this difference reflects the two main models of cooperation, namely the prisoner's dilemma and the stag hunter. The prisoner's dilemma, which becomes the dominant strategy under the conditions of high social heterogeneity and broken informational channels, implies that it is profitable not to cooperate. Under the stag hunter model — a model involving a common goal and a common project — cooperative strategies are more advantageous. The various post-communist countries in different transition phases can be approximated to either one of those two games — the prisoner's dilemma or the stag hunter. The alternation of the games is conditional on the existence of external and internal social anchors.     

Political Economy of Systemic and Micro-Corruption Throughout the World

The purpose of this paper is to apply some of the core general principles of heterodox political economy — especially with an institutional and evolutionary emphasis — to the topic of corruption as a global, regional, and national phenomenon. I start with the principle of historical specificity, where the known history of corruption processes and concepts are examined. I follow the evolution of the corruption discourse, starting with the classical scholars of ancient Greece and numerous others, who had a systemic view of the matter. I proceed through the micro-views of Roman law, to Adam Smith and others who took an individualist view of corruption, and onto the reemergence of the corruption discourse in the period between the 1970s and the 2010s. In the process, I investigate the micro-perspective, but increasingly center on the "modern classical works" on systemic corruption. Then, I present the basics of a modern institutional and evolutionary perspective on corruption through the principle of contradiction, which defines corruption as the promotion of vested interests against the common good in the form of bribery, fraud, embezzlement, state capture, nepotism, extortion, and others. Social dominance theory is applied to corruption vis-à-vis dominant and subordinate groups, and the styles of corruption activated by elites are surveyed as they gain resources, favors, and economic surplus against the interests of "common people." Finally, I scrutinize the principle of uneven development, paying special attention to four main stylized facts about corruption throughout the world in relation to (i) development patterns, (ii) corporate corruption, (iii) key sectors/nations, and (iv) inequality. Throughout the paper, I outline ways to reduce corruption and modify the structure of power to benefit the common good, socioeconomic performance, and the functioning of institutions.     

Democracy Evolving: A Diversity of Institutional Contradictions Transforming Political Economy

I analyze democracy as an evolving socio-historical process of autonomy, participative governance, social learning, and institutionalization. I discuss a variety of institutional contradictions, ranging from protective versus developmental democracy, socialist versus capitalist democracy, transcendental versus comparative institutionalism, and utilitarian versus pragmatist democracy. I argue that these contradictions are inherent in the agonistic nature of democracy that is transforming political economy along with the antagonistic interests of its members and institutions. I also present a basic synthesis of some dynamic aspects of democracy that enable and enhance social emancipation and transformation.     

The Living Wage,Economic Efficiency,and Socio-Economic Wellbeing in a Competitive Market Economy

Conventional economic wisdom views a Living Wage as costly in term of economic efficiency and competitiveness. I argue, based on x-efficiency theory, that higher wages need not cause any economic harm and can, on the contrary, generate higher levels of material wellbeing. Higher wages can be expected to induce x-efficiency and technological change cost offsets. In this context, an effective living wage, one that is above some subsistence minimum, can have a net efficiency effect on the economy. Therefore, a living wage greater than the wage rate generated by the free market cannot be predicted to generate economic harm. With the institutional parameters in place to realize a living wage, the economic pie can be expected to grow to accommodate the living wage.     

Technological innovation and long wave theory: Two pieces of the puzzle

Since the 1930s, there have been few attempts to recast long wave theory and address the problems raised by Schumpeter's and Kuznets' models; most work has been empirical. This paper uses an inter-industrial analytical framework to explain stagnation, downswing and recovery. The proposed rationale enables us to dispense with Schumpeter's hypothesis of periodic bunching of radical innovations.Paper presented at the Schumpeter Society Meetings held at Airlie House, Virginia, June 3, 1990. I want to thank Alfred Kleinknecht and Wolfgang Stolper for comments then. This basic model was presented for the first time in the summer of 1979 at TIMS-OSRA in Honolulu at the invitation of Bela Gold, then in a leçon au Collège de France, June 9, 1986 at the invitation of the late François Perroux, when I benefited from his comments and those of Jean Weiller. In 1989, it was presented at the University of Sherbrooke, where I benefited from Petr Hanel's comments, and at the Société canadienne de sciences économiques. I have also benefited from four anonymous reviewers' comments and advice. I thank Daniel Winer for editing.     

Beyond Regulation: Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Complexity and Emergence

Drawing on and contributing to materialist state theory, the regulation approach and institutional economics for more than three decades, Bob Jessop can certainly be considered one of the foremost Marxist political economists of our time. Recently, he has taken on board the cultural turn in social analysis by developing a highly original cultural political economy of the knowledge-based economy. As a contribution to the further development of a cultural political economy that is sensitive to the cultural dimensions of social life while retaining an emphasis on capital accumulation and state regulation, this article directs attention to the limits of Jessop's approach and suggests possible amendments to the theory. In particular, the article highlights the need to move beyond a concern with regulation towards a cultural political economy of complexity and emergence.     

Social Capital and the Shadow Economy

Viewed in a wider context of paid and unpaid informal economic activities, the shadow economy highlights the little recognized ambivalence of social capital as both potentially positive and negative in outcomes for different groups in the economy. Using a concept of social capital as access to durable networks of actual and virtual resources, as claimed by Pierre Bourdieu, I examine the shadow economy as a source of both resilience and repression, intimately connected to the formal economy and tied to a neo-liberal agenda. I draw from review activities I have previously conducted on the informal economy in disadvantaged neighborhoods and from research on social capital in the economy in a European context.     

The Complementary Relationship Between Institutional and Complexity Economics: The Example of Deep Mechanismic Explanations

Analyzing economic systems from an evolutionary-institutional or a complexity perspective are two complementary approaches to economic inquiry. I discuss three arguments in favor of this hypothesis: (i) eminent institutional economists have examined the economy as what today could be considered a complex system; (ii) complexity economists lack meta-theoretical foundations which could be provided by institutionalist theory; and (iii) institutional economists could benefit from using methods of complexity economics. In this context, I argue that scholars considering the economy to be complex should seek to explain it by discovering social mechanisms instead of focusing on prediction. In order to distinguish between alternative explanations, scholars should refer to the deepness of an explanation, rather than to Occam’s razor.     

西藏民族文化旅游资源的保护性开发——基于产权经济理论和关联博弈理论双重视角

本文以巴泽尔产权经济模型为理论基础,分析了西藏民族文化旅游资源的特殊产权属性,指出西藏民族文化旅游资源在开发中受到破坏的制度经济学根源,并提出以关联博弈为基础健全社会声誉机制,规范利益博弈强势方的开发行为,基于产业发展的三大维度原则,构建西藏民族文化旅游资源的保护性开发体系。     

J.M. Clark and Institutional Economics: Remarks on the Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award

This paper outlines the contributions of J.M. Clark to institutional economics. Clark is sometimes seen as standing between institutional and neoclassical economics, but I argue that this view is not accurate. Clark was intimately involved in the definition, promotion, and defense of institutional economics in sessions of the American Economic Association and in a variety of other forums. No other member of the institutionalist group was as much involved in the professional discussion of institutional economics as J.M. Clark. In addition, Clark made a number of key contributions to institutionalist theory in the areas of psychology and economics, the costs of decision-making, overhead costs and business-pricing behavior, the accelerator mechanism and business cycles, workable and effective competition and competition policy, and social control. These contributions, together with the graduate students he trained at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, serve to place him in the center of the institutionalist movement and not on its periphery.     

Information, the Dual Economy, and Development

We examine the interactions between different institutional arrangements in a general equilibrium model of a modernizing economy. There is a modern sector, where productivity is high but information asymmetries are large, and a traditional sector where productivity is low but information asymmetries are small. Consequently, agency costs in the modern sector make consumption lending difficult, while such lending is readily done in the traditional sector. The resulting trade-off between credit availability and productivity implies that not everyone will move to the modern sector. In fact, the laissez-faire level of modernization may fail to maximize net social surplus.
This situation may also hold in the long run: in a dynamic version of the model, a "trickle-down" effect links the process of modernization with reduction in modern sector agency costs. This effect may be too weak and the economy may get stuck in a trap and never fully modernize. The two-sector structure also yields a natural theoretical testing ground for the Kuznets inverted-U hypothesis: we show that even within the "sectoral shifting" class of models, this phenomenon is not robust to small changes in model specification.     

Classical political economy: the subsistence wage,and job guarantee concerns

Abstract:

In the theoretical framework of classical political economy, including the revisions of Marx and the more recent work of Piero Sraffa and others, the concept of the subsistence wage figures prominently. Here, following a recounting of this concept and demonstrating its significance not only for classical theory but also for larger social concerns, I argue that the “base wage” (as it is sometimes termed) as articulated within a “Job Guarantee” program, is (or should be) comparable to the subsistence wage but requires modification to make it (roughly) equivalent. It will be demonstrated that adherents of the classical approach did not rest their wage theory on a quasi-neoclassical supply–demand approach (with some primitive marginal productivity notion lying behind a supposed demand for labor schedule), but understood wages as socially determined where institutional and historic forces established a normative standard around which market wages gravitated. Such an approach was shared by, among others, Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes.     

公司治理研究的理论、模型及其方法变革

公司治理研究的理论基础是经济学中的企业理论。企业理论研究的三个理论命题,核心是所有权问题。公司治理是企业控制权和剩余索取权的制度安排。公司治理研究的外部边界是经济制度、经济发展环境和社会文化环境。中国经济体制改革和经济发展特定背景下公司治理研究,应当把机理研究作为基础性理论研究工作。     

Instrumentalism and Economic Policy: The Quest for Reasonable Value

Neuroeconomics and behavioral economics (NEBE) is one of the most dynamic fields in contemporary economics. However, from the viewpoint of economic methodology there are still substantial reasons why NEBE is irrelevant for economic theory. This paper argues that they will only become an essential part of economics if they are embedded into a fully-fledged institutional and evolutionary paradigm. I develop a Neo-Veblenian theory of the individual that starts out from the observation that modern brain sciences do not support the notion of the brain to be an integrated and consistent rational decision apparatus. An evolutionary explanation is offered for this, which reinstates Veblen's distinction between adaptation as engineering optima and social selection. Individual identity does only emerge through communication and interaction among brains, in particular via language. The concept of the "extended brain" is proposed, which is applied to define human individuality as a social phenomenon. Thus, the systematic unity of neuroeconomics and institutional economics is established.     

Market, civic virtues, and civic bargaining in the medieval and early modern age: some evidence from sixteenth century Italy

In the last decades, historians have shown that the modern market is rooted in the institutional system created in European towns since the middle ages. This approach leads us beyond the usual opposition between market and society or between public and private market. Indeed, in the medieval and early modern age, the market was part of a wider institutional design of civil life, which had a basic conceptual frame of reference in the notion of the common good, a feature typical of such organicistic and hierarchical societies. This paper explores the process of market construction in the medieval and early modern age. I firstly analysed the role of the market in these societies and then focused on the case of foodstuff provision: a key element of the non-written, ancient pact between rulers and people, based on the assurance of subsistence. As a basis for the study, I employed sixteenth century documents regarding Vicenza, a medium-sized town in the Republic of Venice. These show very clearly that, in general, market and price regulation was not the result of arbitrary interventions by public authorities; on the contrary, it was the result of a process of negotiation, which I call civic bargaining. This process involved??to various degrees??public authorities, landowners, merchants and guilds, and the town??s people, the pursuit of the common good being, in practice, a matter of balancing various needs and interests. Present-day economic and social public policies are, in many aspects, an inheritance of the institutional system created in the medieval and early modern age: knowledge of these origins is useful in the present debate regarding economic versus social development, as discussed at the end of the paper.     

社会主义经济转轨的马克思主义分析方法

中外经济学家研究社会主义经济转轨的方法大体有五种:一是“激进—渐进”的速度分析方法,二是“目标—指标”的定量分析方法,三是“政治—经济”的关联分析方法,四是“成本—效益”的经济分析方法,五是“过程—绩效”的实证分析方法。这些分析方法既有其合理性,同时又存在着缺陷。本文认为,立足于历史唯物主义科学世界观的马克思主义制度分析方法是研究社会主义经济转轨的科学方法。为此,本文运用马克思主义的制度分析方法,即“生产方式—社会结构”分析方法对社会主义经济转轨进行深入而系统的分析。本文的基本观点是:社会主义经济转轨实质上是社会经济结构即生产方式与生产关系的变革,这一变革的根源在于传统社会主义生产方式与社会经济结构的内在矛盾,这一变革的趋势必然是构建与市场经济相适应的现代社会主义模式。