Evolutionary Economics and Cultural Hermeneutics: Veblen,Cultural Relativism,and Blind Drift

The aim of this paper is to quantify the importance of institutions in economic growth and to identify the factors that determine institutional quality. For this purpose, we estimate a system of simultaneous equations with an income equation and another one of institutional quality and use a broad sample of countries with very different levels of development. The analysis is also carried out for three sub-samples of different income levels. In addition, a test of the robustness of the results to econometric techniques is performed.