Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy
Lessons from Medieval Trade

This 2006 book presents a unifying concept of the term institution.

Avner Greif (Author)

9780521480444, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 January 2006

526 pages, 7 tables
23.5 x 16.1 x 3.3 cm, 0.94 kg

'Avner Greif's study is a major landmark on the road to increasing our understanding of institutions and the role that they play in economic performance.' Douglass C. North, 1993 Nobel Laureate in Economics

It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. They also fail to explain why institutions are influenced by the past, why it is that they can sometimes change, why they differ so much from society to society, and why it is hard to study them empirically and devise a policy aimed at altering them. This 2006 book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration. It presents a multi-disciplinary perspective to study endogenous institutions and their dynamics.

Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Introduction
2. Institutions and transactions
Part II. Institutions as Systems in Equilibria: 3. Private-order contract enforcement institutions: the Maghribi traders coalition
4. The organizational underpinnings of credible commitment by the state: the Merchant Guild
5. Endogenous institutions and game-theoretic analysis
Part III. Institutional Dynamics as a Historical Process: 6. A theory of endogenous institutional change
7. Institutional trajectories: how past institutions affect current ones
8. Building a state: Genoa's Rise and Fall
9. Cultural beliefs and the organization of society
Part IV. The Empirical Method of Comparative and Historical Institutional Analysis: 10. The institutional foundations of impersonal exchange
11. Interactive, context-specific analysis
Part V. Concluding Comments: 12. Institutions, history, and development.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Political economy [KCP], Comparative politics [JPB]