Understanding the Process of Economic Change

Douglass C. North

188 pages, parution le 17/03/2005

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Résumé

In this landmark work, a Nobel Prize-winning economist develops a new way of understanding the process by which economies change. Douglass North inspired a revolution in economic history a generation ago by demonstrating that economic performance is determined largely by the kind and quality of institutions that support markets. As he showed in two now classic books that inspired the New Institutional Economics (today a subfield of economics), property rights and transaction costs are fundamental determinants. Here, North explains how different societies arrive at the institutional infrastructure that greatly determines their economic trajectories.

North argues that economic change depends largely on "adaptive efficiency," a society's effectiveness in creating institutions that are productive, stable, fair, and broadly accepted--and, importantly, flexible enough to be changed or replaced in response to political and economic feedback. While adhering to his earlier definition of institutions as the formal and informal rules that constrain human economic behavior, he extends his analysis to explore the deeper determinants of how these rules evolve and how economies change. Drawing on recent work by psychologists, he identifies intentionality as the crucial variable and proceeds to demonstrate how intentionality emerges as the product of social learning and how it then shapes the economy's institutional foundations and thus its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.

Understanding the Process of Economic Change accounts not only for past institutional change but also for the diverse performance of present-day economies. This major work is therefore also an essential guide to improving the performance of developing countries.

L'auteur - Douglass C. North

Douglass C. North (né en 1920) est diplômé de l'université de Californie à Berkeley, il a servi dans la marine marchande comme navigateur de 1942 à 1946 avant de s'orienter vers une carrière universitaire. Professeur à l'université Washington de Saint-Louis (Missouri) depuis 1983, il y a créé un institut de recherche, le Centre d'économie politique. Il est également chercheur à la Hoover institution de l'université de Stanford.
Ses travaux sur l'histoire économique, l'idéologie, le changement institutionnel et la croissance lui ont valu le prix Nobel en 1993.

Sommaire

Preface
An Outline of the Process of Economic Change
The Issues Involved In Understanding Economic Change
- Introduction
- Uncertainty in a Non-ergodic World
- Belief Systems, Culture, and Cognitive Science
- Consciousness and Human Intentionality
- The Scaffolds Humans Erect
- Taking Stock
The Road Ahead
- Introduction
- The Evolving Human Environment
- The Sources of Order and Disorder
- Getting It Right and Getting It Wrong
- The Rise of the Western World
- The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union
- Improving Economic Performance
- Where Are We Going?
Bibliography
Index

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Princeton University Press
Auteur(s)	Douglass C. North
Parution	17/03/2005
Nb. de pages	188
Format	16 x 24
Couverture	Broché
Poids	447g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780691118055
ISBN13	978-0-691-11805-5